According to Anthony Iannarino, there are several poor practices that salespeople would do well to shake. These five are at the top of his list:
- Don’t send emails to ask for an appointment; it is impersonal and will hardly communicate the value of your request.
- Don’t waste time on prospects whose budgets cannot afford your services or who are only willing to pay minimum price for your product. Your time is better spent nurturing more valuable relationships; spend that time wooing your dream clients!
- Don’t multitask: when you sit down to make calls, don’t waste your time researching prospects in between conversations. Make separate time for research and separate time to get in the groove of phone calls.
- Don’t drag your feet in burying dead deals; instead of trying to resuscitate a lost lead, invest that time into investigating the holes in your sales process. Focus on understanding the cause of death so that you do not see repeated issues.
- Don’t get too excited about a Request for Proposal. If you haven’t nurtured the relationship and don’t understand all the stakeholders, the RFP might not be worth your time; if they are a qualified client, you probably ought to have researched and prospected this client before the RFP came in.
Watch your time; don’t waste your valuable energies on unworthy prospects or clients. When you invest your time, do so strategically in order to maximize your selling and soliciting.
Ref: http://thesalesblog.com/2016/03/11/stop-wasting-sales-time/
BoweryJE22
I think that this is really interesting, and I would definitely agree with the second one. I think that people who don’t have the money for something are often most excited about products, because it is their dream, and it’s the salespersons job to figure out whether they are legitimate clients in terms of budget or not.