10 Biggest Mistakes Salespeople Make And How To Avoid Them : 10 Mistakes That Kill Sales

Most salespeople have been there, you are trying to sell and people are not buying, you must try to understand where the problem is coming from. Whether the problem is from you, or from them, or from the product, service, idea or proposal that you want to sell to them.

As revealed in the book “Sell Your Way To Freedom” Below are 10 major reasons why people may not be buying from you or why people may even stop buying from you.

1. Trust has not been built between the seller and the buyer.

Most people do not easily open up their minds or jump into paying or following anybody or anything that is pushed to their face. They need to feel a certain level of safety and connection to what you are showing them in order to open their wallet or their mind to it. And this level of safety and connection mainly comes when people feel that they have been heard or understood by the seller. This means that when you are trying to sell an idea, product or service to people, the most important thing to do is to demonstrate that you understand your potential buyer and the circumstance in which they are at that particular moment of sale: whether they are fun-seeking students, tight-budgeted fathers, housewives, new mothers, children, neglected spouses, overworked staff, junior or senior working class people; you must try to know the aspirations of their social class and possible challenges that are generally experienced by people in that socio-economic bracket. 

You cannot demonstrate an understanding of your potential buyer without understanding something about them and their immediate situation or aspiration. And you cannot understand something about their immediate or aspirational situation without observing them as closely as possible to know what they aspire for. Dale Carnegie advises his readers in the book ‘How to Win friends and influence people’ to never present a proposal to someone of note without first of all observing the person for some days. This very observation will help you to understand the person well enough to know their aspiration before you can craft a proposal that responds to their aspirations.

Human beings are all aspirational beings, who are always reaching for something newer, bigger, faster or better than what we have at the moment. And the most important thing in sales is to understand your potential buyers’ aspirations, in order to truly connect your products, services or ideas to helping them reach that aspiration. Then, they will gladly open up their wallets, their hearts, their souls and their contacts for the redemptive introduction of your product, service or idea.

People buy from you when they feel understood, not when they understand you.

2. The seller has not served the appropriate motive

In some piecemeal products and services that can have millions of customers, you may not have the capacity to individually study or understand your customers. This is applicable in small products and services like gadgets, clothes, food, drink, movies, songs, books or other commodities that can sell many similar copies. In this case, a marketer does not have to start crafting individual proposals or waiting several days to observe the potential clients. Instead, the marketer has to show something that can universally and generally connect with the most popular sentiment of the people in the society at the time. And the best way to do this is to identify and embody a noble motive that is in tune with the people’s collective moods and aspirations. This could be one of the nine motives from Napoleon Hill, or any other motive that you can derive from them to connect you to the spirit of the society in which you are doing your business.

This ability to properly identify and embody a motive that connects to the soul of a community or nation is far more effective in selling than just putting up a super-charged personality with high-pressure sales energy, shouting and acting tough to show the powerfulness of your product. For sales mostly come from connection. Some of the best motives to identify with and embody in every society are the motives of love, desire for power and fame, desire to build or create and most especially freedom. Freedom from ignorance, from tyranny, from limitations, from social disorder, from wickedness, from hunger, from diseases, from poverty and others. When you primarily embody and internalize any of these motives, and allow it to manifest through your products and services, it becomes easier for people in the society to connect with you and to seek to partner with you. Selling mostly comes from a feeling of connection to your brand.

3.The seller has not accurately described the product to the best understanding of the buyer

We noted earlier in this chapter that people buy from you when they feel understood, and not just when they understand you. So, even their effort to understand you and your product is not an objective understanding for your own sake. Instead, their effort to understand you and your product is done in relation to how you, your brand and your product can respond to their own needs and aspirations. If your product or brand can bring them closer to their aspiration, then there is a likelihood that they are going to buy from you.

Thus, in your effort to present your product, service or idea to your intended customers, the first thing to consider is how to clearly demonstrate the elements of your product, your service or idea that responds to their own aspirations, their sense of pride, their sense of purpose, achievement, beauty or power. If you can show people how your product brings them closer to their sense of fulfilment, be sure that they are going to buy. Hence, you may need to involve some objects, testimonies, stories or analogies to demonstrate how your product can help them reach their aspiration. Show it, not tell it. Dramatize it, illustrate it, play to their sense of imagination so that they can be the ones to connect your product or brand to their aspirations by themselves.

4. No pain yet on the side of the buyer

Some people do not know exactly what they want, or at least what they need. And until you point it out to them, they may not even see their need for some things that they truly need. This is one of the reasons why your first job as a seller is to consistently educate the people. This constant educating is not just about trying to sell your products or services to the people at every turn. In fact, you should never be in a rush to sell or to bombard people with your products, otherwise they become irritated and start trying to avoid you. Instead, you should be eager to steadily and freely educate, and listen to the people as normal people with their different lives and aspirations. You have to elicit more and more questions from them, and be eager to give them the accurate answers that will not only clarify their aspirations and means, but also lead them closer to their aspirations. In the process, they will be the ones to ask for more information about your products.

Hence, in this age of the internet when most people can be reached through the internet on their gadgets, you have to create some online presence, where you serve them a portion of the cake first. This means that you must educate the people on the different causes, parts and implications of their problems to show that you properly understand, not just their problems, but the cause of their problems before offering them some of the solution. Eventually, they will want to get the whole cake, and then ask for the price. Hence, it is better to provide a little value to them first before selling the main product. 

5. The buyer has no money or has less money

The sale of your product or service cannot take place by the desire or demand of the people alone. These people that are desiring and demanding your product or service have to have something to give in return as price in order to maintain the continued production and supply of your products and services for the society. This ability to give something in return (or pay) for demanding your products and services is what distinguishes viable demands from nonviable demands. For although everybody can desire or demand what they like, ultimately the main people that can get those things are those who have the adequate money (or something valuable) to give in return for them.

Therefore, when your products or services are good and people are showing interest in buying them, but are not eventually buying them, you may need to reconsider the price that you have placed on the product or service. Due to shame or shyness, some people may not even tell you that they are not buying because of the price that they cannot afford. Some may even find one small fault or any other frivolous cause, or cite another producer’s price or quality as the reason why they cannot buy your products. And if you are not attentive to their body language, you may not know that the main problem is that they do not have the sufficient amount of money you placed on the product or service. 

Hence, when you notice this consistently, the first thing to do is to compare your price with other people’s prices. If the other people’s price is lower than yours, which makes customers buy from them instead of buying from you, then you may have to find a way to reduce your cost of production so that you can set a competitive price in the market. However, if you notice that people want the product, but are not even buying from other dealers, then it is possible that the whole economy is biting down on the people. And you need to come up with a solution, which can start with trying to make a discount, or to still make smaller versions of your products, without reducing the quality of the products. People may even buy more of the smaller version than the bigger version you have. In whatever you do, you simply have to listen to your customers and be flexible enough to make appropriate changes to accommodate their economic situation, while staying afloat in your business, so that you do not go bankrupt.

6. The seller has a negative attitude, negative personality

Have you ever turned back from buying something from a shop because the shopkeeper was arrogant, insensitive, condescending or rude to a fellow customer, or even to one of his/her employees. As we mentioned earlier, consistent sales come from the feeling of people’s connection to a brand, its motive and then the products, services or ideas. So, if your attitude or those of your employees and representatives do not manifest the noble motive that you have identified and chosen to embody through your brand, products and services, then you will probably lose many of your customers or followers. Even if you have the most beautiful product in the market, but you or some of your employees or representatives are clearly insensitive, impolite, condescending or rude, you run the risk of losing your customers. Thus, you must be consistent and intentional about cultivating and sustaining a pleasing personality and atmosphere in your business. In his book, ‘How to sell your way through life’ Napoleon Hill lists 21 positive personality traits that you can cultivate to make you appealing to customers. They include:

1. Good showmanship. An efficient showman is someone that understands and uses the art of appealing to the masses, to the people in general. He appeals to people through their imagination and keeps them interested. Good showmanship requires attention to the people so that you can align with their common sentiments, biases, likes, and dislikes at that moment of their emotional spike.

2. Harmony within self. This manifests in one’s composure and behaviour, and is necessary in sales. For no one can have a pleasing personality without first having harmony in his own mind.

3. Definiteness of purpose. It is difficult for an unstable drifter who hovers through life without a definite purpose to appeal to other people. Hence, having a pleasing personality requires that the individual should at least organize his or her life by adopting a definite social purpose to which he and his business can be fully devoted. 

4. Appropriate outfit. A person with a pleasing personality dresses in clothing that is suitable for himself and represents his business, in order to make excellent impressions on both his existing and potential customers. Napoleon Hill says that although clothes may not make the man, they give him an advantageous start, if selected with taste.

5. Posture and carriage of the body. Being able to stand straight, head up, chest out, shoulders high with some level of grace could indicate some degree of strength of character in an individual. You just do not have to overdo it like a military sentry, robot or other artificial mannequins. Just a calm and smooth flow of confident movement of the body to show that you are fully alert and capable of responding to any situation that could arise in your encounter with a customer.

6. Voice. The tone, volume and pitch of one’s voice are important factors of a pleasing personality. A high-pitched voice is never pleasing; it is often offensive.

7. Sincerity of purpose. This is seen in the consistency with which you manifest your chosen motive for a society through your products and services. Without it, one may not have the confidence of others.

8. Choice of language. This is the ability to express yourself in an appropriate language without using offensive slang and profanity.

9. Poise. This comes from self-confidence and self-control. 

10. A keen sense of humor. Being moody and low-spirited is a killer of the atmosphere for sales. Instead the ability to smile, laugh and crack innocent jokes that are appropriate to the situation signifies you as a happy fellow with whom other people will enjoy working. Perhaps no other quality is more essential than this. 

11. Unselfishness. Some people continuously believe that life is a zero-sum game in which some other person has to lose for them to win. Hence, they only think of themselves alone. Fortunately, life can also be a win-win game in which people can create a network of mutual growth and reciprocal exchange, whereby you produce your surplus and exchange it with the surplus from other people’s productivity. Hence, selfishness becomes a negative point for those with such a zero-sum mentality, which makes them unattractive, not just to their potential customers, but also scares away the existing customers that they have.

12. Facial expression. Some people say that the human eyes are the windows through which you peep into their souls. This can also be applied to the face which is one of the most distinguishing parts between people. The face shows how people feel and think about something, and some people can reach very serious decisions just by observing one’s face. Hence, a great salesman will be intentional in using his facial expression to communicate the chosen motive of his business. According to Hill, facial expression is an accurate medium for the interpretation of one’s moods and thoughts. It is the character analyst’s barometer, by which he may measure accurately how one’s mind functions.

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13. Positive thought. The most obvious way to feel the positivity or negativity of people’s hearts is by their words. For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And since words are powerful, they are capable of either inspiring someone to victory, or discouraging someone which can then lead to failure. Negative thoughts, which manifests through negative words and pessimism, become counterproductive in sales. People easily pick up the sentiments of negativity and even look at you and your products through that same lens of negative. Therefore, you have to ensure that you only spread such thoughts that will be pleasing, inspiring and positive to other people.

14. Enthusiasm. People who are lukewarm, dull or lacking energy cannot inspire other people to act favourably. For enthusiasm is an essential factor in the art of selling, which is the art of planting a motive for a favourable response in people’s hearts.

15. A sound body. Despite their desire to be seen as kind, empathetic, supportive and compassionate to the weak, human beings are naturally attracted to the strong, lively, growing and healthy, and are even secretly disgusted by weakness, death, lack and illness. Also, it will be difficult for someone to be enthusiastic without having good health and vigour. And you will not even want a situation where people patronize you, your brand and business from a position of pity, sympathy, mercy and charity, instead of a place of admiration, attraction and desire. If employers and spouses consider strong health as a major criterion in choosing an employee or life-time partner, long-term customers may not act differently. Therefore, it is in your best interest to maintain a strong and sound body; to exercise regularly, eat healthy food, rest well and have regular check-ups to maintain a sound health of mind and body.

16. Imagination. The ability to create mental images that helps your customers to understand the cause, effects and implications of the problems you wish to solve or the need you need to satisfy, also helps the same customers to appreciate how your product or service can solve them. Therefore, you must train your mind to paint mental images and to draw connections between everyday objects and the situations that people experience in their lives, for which they may need your product or service. Without the ability to create such imaginations, people are generally referred to as dumb.

17. Tact. Tact is defined as the sensitivity in dealing with others or dealing with difficult situations. It requires a high level of emotional intelligence and intention to find a win-win solution for everybody involved or affected in an issue. It is a keen sense of what to do or say in order to maintain good relations with others or avoid giving offense. The inability to employ tact in dealing with superiors and customers has cost many people their positions and opportunities. Lack of tact often manifests through loose talks and boldness of expression that eventually offend the stakeholders of your business and thereby repel them from you or your brand.

18. Versatility. Your ability to constantly educate your customers cannot come from a narrow mind-set or restricted awareness of the occurrences and interconnectivity of the community and nation in which they live. Instead, you are able to interact and even guide people towards their aspirations by understanding how the society works. Even if you are not an expert or authority in all the fields, which you can never be, at least you need to understand how the different fields and sections connect and work together in society. Also, you have to know people of different fields in the community or nation, so that you can obtain their cooperation in situations that require an interdisciplinary approach. 

19. The art of being a good listener. We noted earlier that people buy from you when they feel understood, and not when they understand you. And one of the best ways to make people feel like they are understood is to actually listen to them. Just repeating what they told you in a summarized or concise form gives them the feeling that you understand them. It even becomes better if you can mirror the emotions which they portrayed while talking. Then you can give your own little addition with a nobler and stronger emotion. For some people, you may not even need to add anything. Just your ability to truly listen, summarize and repeat what they said in the similar emotion in which they said it is enough to get them to feel understood, and to easily become your friends or customers. Therefore, you may need to learn how to listen when the other people are speaking, without showing contempt or even interrupting them to take the conversation away from them. 

20. The art of forceful speech. Speaking with boldness, passion, life and fluency, instead of murmuring, stammering and timidity is a necessity for every successful salesman. For people are naturally attracted to energy, passion and life, over timidity and weakness. Therefore, in order to manifest these qualities in your speech, you have to have something to say that is worth listening to, and you have to say it with all the enthusiasm you have.

21. Personal magnetism. Napoleon Hill describes this trait as the controlled sexual energy, which is the only element of a pleasing personality that has to be inborn in a person, and many people are already born with it. And if a person has not been born with it, there is no way to acquire it.  He insists that this personal magnetism is the major asset of all great salesmen and all great leaders in all walks of life. 

Finally, you can counter most of the negative personality traits that can affect your brand or business by consistently cultivating and imbibing these 21 personality traits into yourself as a person, and in your employees and representatives.

7. The product is not good. Do not sell serpents. 

Another reason why people may not buy your product is that the product in itself is not good. A product is good or not good based on how it is able to respond to the problems or needs for which it was made, acquired and used. Even if the product looks beautiful and strong, but does not solve the problems for which it was made and acquired, the product can simply be considered as not being good. If you claim that your soap brand is good in cleaning stains, and it has a beautiful scent, but did not wash out stains from your customers’ clothes or house, they will not return to buy a second one. Thus, as a businessman, you must first test your products and services with some objective testers, who will give you accurate feedback without being afraid of hurting your feelings if they tell you the truth. Also, you can directly ask the customers these questions to see if your products and services have continued to solve even newer versions of the problems or need it set out to solve in the society. 

8. The seller is not telling the truth

Around the year 2000 in the city of Onitsha in Nigeria, some people were popularly called charismatic sellers of rat-poison. These were high-pitch and highly persuasive marketers of different herbal and orthodox drugs, who claimed that their drugs could cure all sorts of diseases. They normally use high pitches and adorned with a larger than life personality that makes them sound so convincing. Yet, most of the drugs they sold were either adulterated, expired or ineffective. They held sway throughout the area until the people saw through their pretence and started calling them out for arrest. It became clear that many of them did not even care about people’s health or wellbeing. They simply cared about getting the money out of the people’s pockets.

Like these drug merchants, who lied to sell ineffective drugs, and were later called out for their lies, once you lie to your customer, they will never come back. No one likes to feel cheated, even for a single cent. In fact, some people would willingly give out a million dollars to a beggar, but will fight you to the moon if you try to use lies to extract one single dollar from them. Whenever a customer  finds out that you lied to him or her, whether about the quality or price of the products or services they got from you, they will never trust you again. And if they find out, some of them will broadcast it to other people that you are a cheat, and therefore you will lose more of your customer base.

Thus, the best thing is to tell your customers the whole truth and allow them to make the decision whether to buy from you or from other dealers.

9. The product is undervalued

Many great products that take time and resources to produce or render may still stay on the shelves without being sold if their values are not well demonstrated to the intended clients based on their culture or other things to which their value is relevant. And without fully understanding the value of the product, some people could be beating down the cost to a ridiculous price. For price is what people talk about absent of value. Therefore, it becomes necessary for you to advertise and demonstrate the values of your product and services to the targeted demographic. If people are not seeing the value in your products or services, you need to make a clear demonstration of how your product or service brings them closer to their aspiration. How it will make them proud, fulfilled, distinct and well-respected by other people or things in the society. People mostly value things based on their relation to other things in the society. 

10. Talking too much or wasting too much time to close the deal

When you have given the appropriate time and resources to craft your product or service into the best possible form it can have at the time, you do not need to talk too much to get the customer sold into the product or service. You do not have to keep on talking and talking and wasting people’s time. Just a simple demonstration and a pleasant personality should do. A simple strategy that you can adopt in closing deals is to close once you get a ‘YES’ to the three simple questions below:

1. Does this look or sound like what you are looking for? Yes.

2. Do you see yourself using this product now? Yes.

3. Would you want to start today? Yes.

Once you get three Yeses from these three simple questions, then you close the deal immediately without asking more time-wasting questions or describing more parts and qualities and relatives of the product or service that you are offering. Just close the deal, shake hands, and allow him/her to go in peace.