6 Sales Leaks that are robbing you behind your back part –1.

Recently when I was talking to a business owner and we started discussing how his sales team is performing. When I had a look at his team, I noticed simple mistakes that often creeps up on you (or your sales guy) without knowing about it.

The issue is that often this leads to leaving lots of money and business on the table and we don’t know about it. Not to say that I never made this kind of mistake but it’s often easier to take a look at other business than your own from very objective point of view.

Today in this 6 part article series, I am going to talk about…

How to remove these profit leaks from your sales system?

One of the major blunder or profit leak is “Not understanding what your customer wants”.

I’ve seen this sales leak in mostly service providers. The more services you provide, chances are higher of your making this mistake.

If you are not taking care of this, then you’ll find that you are trying to shove your product or service down the customer throats.

It’s like you have a hammer and you are using it to fix everything.

When you create packages that you are going to provide, you’ll make this mistake. Why am I so sure?

Simply, because when you have a product or service package you want to sell and you’ll try to fit your package or service to every prospect you meet. As you get more experienced and to handle this issue, you subconsciously create more packages and more services.

What’s the end result of doing that?

You end up try to do too much and spread thin yourself in many areas. Then you start hiring more people and give them training and it all starts cutting down on your profit. Then you produce more packages and the cycle goes on and on.

Yikes, scary thought. Isn’t it?

How can you avoid doing this simple mistake and end the Cycle of No profit and leakage?

First step is to don’t decide initially what product suits your clients. Don’t day dream about this at all.

Second step is to build a questionnaire for your client. This questionnaire should have as many question as need to help you and your prospective client make the right decision.

Take notice of your customer’s concern, fears, thoughts and most immediate need.

And then you provide them the solution (again, don’t try to hammer it and give your package).

For example, Just couple of days ago, I had a talk with a Webmaster and Internet marketer. He need and wants were something that I could provide, but I would waste lot of time doing the set up and necessary stuff (it was related to SEO).

Within 10 minutes I realized this and confirmed it with him. Then I told him, I can give this service to him but I won’t be completely honest with it, so he should trying going for XYZ company (that I recommended).

Now in this above scenario, I could have spend another 20-30 minutes discussing and find some way to sell it to him but in long term that would have been a bad idea for me. I have to talk to my SEO team and give them additional training and provide set up just for one guy.

His needs were different and I wasn’t ready for it.

In less than 10 minutes I made this decision. Remember I don’t want to follow the endless cycle of spreading myself thin and then losing control of it.

So, you have to spend some time understanding what your client wants and then decide what is the right option. Hammering everything you see is not the right approach for it.