This post was originally published by Jessie Kwak on the Pipedrive Blog
Are you seeing stagnant sales figures when your sales team looks busier than ever? It could be because your salespeople have fallen into bad sales habits and unproductive activities.
Whether it’s obsessing over knocking out low priority tasks or slipping into a monotonous voice while making phone call after phone call, it’s easy for salespeople to get off track.
“The irony is that the sales profession is all about talking with people, but there’s a willingness to prioritize anything that involves not talking to the prospect,” said Andy Paul, founder at Zero-Time Selling Inc.
He added:
Salespeople need to focus on the tasks that are related to helping customers make a decision.
“That’s their job,” he said. “Anything other than that, they should get rid of.”
Alice Heiman, founder of Alice Heiman, LLC, said that while unproductive behaviors can be a real problem in the sales office, the behaviors aren’t always the fault of salespeople. “In a lot of cases, what they’re doing is what their sales managers told them,” she said.
Wherever they originate, sales managers need to be vigilant in keeping an eye out for these seven bad sales habits that can hinder sales productivity.
1. Dialing for dollars
Calling customers and prospects when you don’t have a valid business reason is a waste of time.
“Everybody’s heard the term ‘dialing for dollars’ before, but towards the end of any kind of quota time, sales managers will yell at their teams to get on the phone,” Heiman said.
It’s a bad sales habit Heiman has seen her clients implement without success. At one company, for example, the owner (who was also the sales team manager) decided that every sales rep should call every customer four times a week to get sales.
“That’s unproductive,” Heiman said. “In fact, it might really irritate people so that they will not take your call when you actually have something to say to them.”
Consider your motives before picking up the phone. Are you adding value? Think about whether your conversation will truly move the deal forward.
2. Sticking to a script
Nothing turns a potential client off faster than a salesperson who simply sticks to a script.
“I can’t stress enough that selling requires deliberate, mindful action,” Paul said. “You’ve got to go off script, you’ve got to be engaged with the customer’s concerns and understand how you can serve them.”
Too often, salespeople have a set list of questions to ask, and they spend so much time thinking about crossing off each question that the customer feels their concerns are being ignored.
By focusing on listening to the customer’s needs rather than focusing on accomplishing your own agenda, you’ll put yourself in a better position to provide them with a proper solution and to win them over.
“Sales is hard mental work,” Paul said. “You have to bring your A-game absolutely every time you reach out and touch a prospect.”
3. Treating all your prospects the same
Believe it or not, sales is a creative profession, one that requires salespeople constantly to be thinking about the best approach for a particular prospect rather than trotting out cookie-cutter tactics.
“Many salespeople want to find a process, something they can repeat that works,” Paul said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”
Salespeople need to be aware that the way prospects gather information, communicate and prefer to be sold to can vary wildly.
“It doesn’t mean that you need to do everything 180 degrees from each other, but you have to be aware that they are different,” Paul said.
Approach prospects with an open mind, so you can be ready to tackle anything they bring to the table.
4. Not selling to the right person
Salespeople can waste time by not connecting with the right decision makers within a prospect’s company — whether that’s selling to someone too far down the decision-making chain who will still need to get buy-in, or bypassing the true decision maker in an attempt to sell to the C-suite. (The latter is a big problem.)
“A lot of times, sales training uniformly tells sales reps that they need to ‘sell to the C- suite’,” Paul said. “It really does a disservice to the salesperson to make them think that they really need to oversell this product when the actual decision makers are much lower.”
Before going in, salespeople need to conduct research, whether on the company’s website or via social media, to ensure they reach the best possible person for the job at hand. Making accurate contacts will avoid the initial message from getting diluted or lost down the line, as it’s passed on from person to person.
5. Letting email rule the day
Many salespeople have been trained to jump at every incoming email, but that can create an unproductive rhythm of reacting throughout the day, rather than prioritizing the work that should take precedence.
Instead of letting email rule the day, Heiman trains her clients to turn off notifications and check email at certain intervals. She recommended that salespeople spend time first thing in the morning, prioritizing which tasks are important and doing those first.
“After that, you can take an hour and you check your email,” she said.
6. Doing work that should be delegated
Spending time and energy on tasks that are outside the salesperson’s job description is another bad habit.
When Heiman noticed a client’s sales team entering their own orders — a task that customer service was supposed to be doing — she learned that the salespeople had gotten into the habit because customer service was taking too long. Once sales and customer service had agreed on a deadline for order entry, the sales team was freed up to spend more time on the phone.
“We also taught customer service to let the salesperson know that the order had been typed in, so the salespersons could stop worrying about that,” Heiman said. “Because worrying takes up time, too.”
Delegating tasks that are specific to a team member’s strengths will eliminate unnecessary burden and create a smoother, more efficient workflow.
7. Poor time management
A survey by Cirrus Insight cited that salespeople spend more than half of their day on tasks that aren’t related to their main job — namely, selling.
Time spent not selling is a huge problem, Heiman added. When she worked with one client to analyze their time, she found they spent less than 20% of it actually having conversations with customers.
“Salespeople are busy every minute, but they’re not always doing the right work,” she said. “They really need to prioritize all the work that they’re doing, schedule the priority work on the calendar, then fit everything else in around it.”
If you are looking to get rid of bad sales habits, develop good sales habits, and boost your sales productivity, a sales management tool like Pipedrive offers a streamline visual pipeline that motivates actions, and helps you and your team complete the activities needed to close more deals faster.
Do your salespeople have bad habits?
Alice can work with your sales leaders to change that. Call her to chat about it at 775-852-5020 or schedule an appointment.
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