My top 5 sales failures
More than 15 years ago (yes I'm that old) I started my first sales role. It was at Belgacom (the name of Proximus at that time) and fresh from school I was eager to get my first pay check. It was never my intention to get in to sales as my dream was still to become a professional soccer player. But now about 15 years later, I have never been discovered to play professional soccer and I have built my career in sales oriented jobs.
In this post, I want to share what I learned, because I strongly believe you need to fail in some parts before you can truly learn.
Fail n°1: focus on the money
Especially in my first year at Proximus, there was a lot of focus on targets, because achieving targets resulted in a bonus. You can imagine for a bunch of young sales people this was the "wolf of wallstreet" moment. Getting the highest numbers... But this resulted often in sales where you offered solutions which didn't match the need of the customer. I even remember a case where a man entered the shop and made the complaint we sold an internet connection to an old lady who didn't even have a computer. (but it was needed to get digital television) To recap this lesson learned, focus on the need of the customer. At the end, you will be rewarded!
Fail n°2: Do-it-yourself mentality
This is still something where I need to work on. I often have the intention to do everything by myself. Probably this is something within my DNA, because it happens to me in my personal life too. I think it has something to do with my childhood, where I was part of a big family (7 children - where I was the only boy with 6 sisters, yes, really... 6 sisters) and we grew up in a way we needed to take care for ourselves.
But now back to the work related. During my job at Connect Group and also SPICA, I often got called about operational issues and it is trap if you get too much involved into the operations and there are different reasons for it.
- Your colleague of operations will not appreciate you pass him or her.
- Your colleague will tell you next time: "do it yourself"
- You might get corrected by your manager
- The customer will take it for granted, that you will solve his problem next time too.
So sorry to my ex-colleagues for all the times I passed you. The intention was to help the customer.
The lesson learned here is that you need to involve the entire team, because everyone is sales. And the sooner you recognize this and you involve the team, they will become your number one ambassador and finally you will be more successful.
Fail n°3: Going too fast
Another life long action point for me. I always want to go fast, but especially in service oriënted businesses the salescycles are often quite long. Then sales is a marathon and not a sprint. You will need to give the time to your customer or potential customer to make his or her decision.
It is a difficult trade-off to force a customer to close the sale vs giving him the space to make his decision with 150% of his support. I can give you plenty of examples where I was willing to go too fast and where I lost or maybe irritated the customer. But also where I was waiting too long to close the deal and gave the customer the opportunity to choose another solution.
Fail n°4: Forgetting to fill the funnel
I have never been the person with too much focus on theory and following a strict planning. But it really makes sense to get a kind of process or methodology where you find comfortable to work in.
When I was working at IXON (a Dutch company which didn't have any sales in Belgium yet), I had the focus to get as many customer as soon as possible. So I started calling, calling, calling,... After a while I got quite successfull and my agenda was full of appointments. That full, that I didn't have the time to call new leads or to fill the funnel and this created a gap in my appointments and resulted in an unstable customer onboarding as a result. So I needed to start calling again and this methodology repeated itself.
calling - appointments - onboarding - GAP - calling - appointments - onboarding - GAP ...
Yes, indeed, very simple. Structure your week in a part calling, a part appointments and a part the onboarding or follow-ups. This makes you get more stable results and no additional stress to get a real gap in your results.
Nowadays, sales has shifted and you need to work far more on your personal brand and marketing activities, so don't forget to add this in your own way of working. Sales needs marketing and the other way around.
Fail n°5: Being a copy-cat
Last, but not least, I was always looking up to real successfull sales people. People who are very charismatic, who fill the room only by their presence, who can talk like Barack Obama or Steve Jobs, ...
Yes I tried to copy some of the examples I saw in the field. The result? It didn't bring me any success, on the contrary, it made me unreliable. People didn't thrust me. So my advice is to be yourself, be authentic and if you have the right intentions to help your customer, then you will built relationships which might last for a lifetime.
As a conclusion, what I also saw that the way of doing sales in a corporate environment vs a start-up /scale-up environment is really different. Selling a product vs a service has also a big impact in the way you go to the market. If the DNA of the company is sales oriented or more engineering oriented, this has also a big influence on how you operate. The cool thing is, I had the chance to do it all and day by day I'm still learning (read: fail in doing things)
I'm referring to U2 "Take on your bootz" and go! Failure is a part of your journey.
