In this series of blogs, I wanted to address 3 common sales mistakes. This blog – addressing the third mistake – is short, sharp and makes one simple point only. The sales mistake it highlights is so obvious you’ll think it hardly worth your time reading. Yet, this mistake is made by more than 70% of the businesses I know when their mind first turns to growing sales.
To recap the first 2 blogs briefly, selling requires 2 pre-conditions before it has any chance of being successful: Need and Trust. If both elements are present, we have a chance to sell; if one or both is not present, we will be unable to sell. It’s important to recognise the pre-conditions because, if we jump into selling without Need and Trust, not only will we fail but we will also misunderstand why we’re failing; we’ll think our sales ‘pitch’ is wrong. No, your sales pitch might be brilliant but you’re selling to people without a need or to people that don’t trust you.
Now for the third and final sales mistake I see in companies when they try to increase sales revenue.
COMMON SALES MISTAKE #3
Business development to new prospective clients is usually difficult, slow and expensive so it should not be the first thing you do to grow your sales. So, if you already have clients and you want to grow revenues, ask yourself 2 questions first.
- Can we sell other products or services to our existing clients?
- Can we sell the same products or services to our existing clients more often?
The benefits of talking to existing clients is probably obvious: they already know, like and trust us. We’re already a supplier so no procurement hurdles to jump through. We have their contact details and they’ll probably take our call, answer our email or agree to meet.
When you compare the ease with which you can access this group of buyers and the relative speed with which they’re likely to buy or say no with the challenge of generating new revenue from buyers that have never heard of you, you’ll realise that this is a big mistake to make.
Go first to existing clients. If that goes well, the increased revenue generated will help you pay for the more expensive, longer-term business of new money from new clients. This tip might be short, it might be simple but I’ve seen it save 100s of 1000s of pounds and months of frustrated sales stagnation.
So, that’s the end of this series of 3 blogs, highlighting COMMON SALES MISTAKES. As your takeaways, focus on finding needs that you can serve; build trust with your target audience; and talk to existing clients to grow sales first.
