What terrible mistakes have you committed in sales? As a sales trainer and sales coach I see loads of sales mistakes, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t committed a few in my time!
One of my worst was at Xerox. As a senior member of the team, I often had the newbies shadowing me.
We had this one call. The trainee hadn’t started yet, but had been on the training. So he was out with me for the day.
I had a meeting. It was with an ideal client. I’d done my research. I knew our solution would work for them.
I conducted the meeting.
It went perfectly (you know when everything works, you ask the right questions, you get the right answers?). It was one of them.
The client gave agreement to go ahead – I needed to submit the quote for it, to be rubber-stamped, but basically all-systems-go!
The trainee was ridiculously excited about how well it had gone – along the lines of ‘that was brilliant – I see how everything fits together, thank you so much Janet for showing me how it should be done”
So far so good.
Then I made my mistake. I can’t even pretend it was something I did …. it was something I didn’t do.
Can you guess what?
Well full marks to you if you got it …..
I never followed up.
I didn’t do the quote.
Then I felt bad because I didn’t do the quote straight away, so then it became this ‘thing’. I couldn’t even ring to apologise I was so embarrassed. Just all that effort down the drain.
Big lesson there.
Just do what you should do in the right order. No bells, no whistles. Just common sense.
Silly Janet (I’m smarter now I hope!)
So what are your howlers – if you’re brave enough to share?