The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Now, be warned. Each of these methods for undermining success is potent. If your purpose is to ensure that the prospect doesn’t buy, all you need is one of these five. Any one will do.

1. Fail to Qualify the Prospect

Since this is the first significant step in any professional B2B selling process, it’s your first opportunity to mess up. And this mistake has become harder to make in recent years, but if you go out of your way, you can do it. Harder to make? Yes. Qualifying the prospect requires information, and information is abundant these days. You can search for information about a company and find buckets full. In some cases, you can learn about specific challenges they’re facing or opportunities they’re chasing. And information about specific people at the company that you might approach? If you want to stay in the dark about them, be sure to steer clear of LinkedIn. Not only is it easier than ever to qualify a prospect, but these days many of the best prospects are raising their hands and qualifying themselves. But never mind all that: Derail your sale by investing gobs of time in an unqualified prospect.

A decade ago, a group of hospitals in Michigan implemented a procedure in their ICUs that reduced the infection rate by 66%, cut expense by $75 million, and saved an estimated 1,500 lives. Some new technology? A wonder drug? Nope. 

It was a checklist, used when inserting an intravenous line into a patient. Author James Clear calls this the power of never skipping steps, and he wrote about in a recent blog post at JamesClear.com. Surgeon and best-selling author Atul Gawande wrote a very strong-selling book about the extraordinary impact of the simple checklist, The Checklist Manifesto. 

With the great religious holidays about redemption—Easter and Passover—both happening this weekend, we thought it would be fun to think about what redemption might be like for an earnest, hard-working sales manager. This is the manager who works his or her butt off to get it right, but life being what it is, still has plenty of near-misses and disappointing outcomes.

When that redemption day finally arrives at the sales manager’s office, it might look like this:

1. Staff turnover is reduced to zero for one full year. No one quit, and no one needed to be sacked.
2. An entire week goes by with no emergency emails after 6pm that “absolutely have to be dealt with right now.”
3. A year of bliss in which the sales team makes budget in every category and on every line the company measures.
   

Can you have too much emphasis on new business?

I submit that’s not a crazy question. There’s a scenario, more common than you think, where an excessive emphasis on finding new clients can mask a significant problem growing inside your organization. Ask yourself: What role is that new business playing? Is it fueling your sharp growth curve? If so, congratulations.

Too often, the answer is that new business is playing a very different role—that new clients are coming in the front door just fast enough to replace those who are leaving by the back door. The emphasis on new business development in your organization might be coming at a high cost—not placing sufficient emphasis on satisfying, retaining, and growing your existing accounts.

Or you might not even be breaking even: You could be working harder than ever to find new revenue that is failing even to cover the losses you’re experiencing due to attrition. It reminds me of the classic line from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”

“Those who fail to plan are guilty of planning to fail.”

Nothing is more normal than obsessing about our shortcomings. It's a sign that you care about your performance, and that you wish you could be absolutely fabulous in every single aspect of your job. So naturally, you look to those ways in which you don't quite measure up to the best--and you try to figure out ways to fix those things. If only you could banish every blemish, you'd be beautiful.

But focusing on your shortcomings is also strategically stupid. And those who obsess about what they can't do risk real damage to their career.

Many of us know people in our lives—whether at work, in our family, or among our circle of friends—who take their athletic pursuits pretty seriously. Whether they're amateur runners, swimmers, lifters, tennis players, or triathletes, they approach their workouts, their competitions, even their fun in a very methodical, purposeful, almost scientific way. They know it's the only way to grow and improve.

Surprisingly, many of these same people treat their chosen profession with a much less serious or methodical approach. They have much to learn—from themselves! In the brief slide show below, we share just five attributes successful salespeople have in common with successful athletes.  

Who should you be sharing this with?