- August 31, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My wife and I add plants to our perennial gardens each year. She chooses the plants, decides where they should be placed, and I have the important job of digging holes. One thing I have excelled at in my hole digging responsibilities is cutting into the coaxial cable that makes up our dog’s invisible fence, rendering it useless each time. As long as I know where the break is, I can splice it back together again. I have spliced that cable back together so many times, there are more splices than Pete Rose had hits in his career. I exaggerate. You could say I have spent a lot of time chasing my tail as each repair takes around fifteen minutes.
That got me thinking about how salespeople chase their tails and waste time that could be better utilized on actual selling activities. I listed the first twenty time-wasting, tail-chasing, money-losing, things that come to mind and they all reflect some degree of lack of commitment, lack of discipline, lack of consistency and excuse making:
- Getting Ready to make calls but not actually making calls
- Making cold calls but not improving with each one
- Not following a world-class, best-practices sales process
- Failing to uncover compelling reasons to buy
- Failing to fully qualify their opportunities
- Not utilizing a sales-specific predictive opportunity scorecard
- Inappropriate follow-up
- Focusing on relationship building to the exclusion of selling
- Using cold emails as a replacement for cold calling
- Adding followers to LinkedIn instead of engaging with potential customers
- Assuming that people will want to meet with them just because they reached out
- Offering to provide a quote or proposal to prospects who are not qualified to buy from them
- Waiting for RFPs, call-ins, and reorders as their primary source of business
- Leaving ineffective voicemails and expecting their calls to be returned
- Giving up on legitimate prospects while continuing to pursue lost causes
- Failing to perfect their messaging
- Insisting on talking and selling instead of listening and guiding
- Rushing through discovery instead of taking their time
- Taking too many breaks
- Busy work – CRM, call reports, spreadsheets, etc.
The point is that chasing your tail – whether gardening or selling – is a giant waste of time and money. On the gardening side, I gave up on the old technology – a coaxial cable that wasn’t buried deep enough in the ground, and upgraded to a geofence collar to keep our dog safe.
In sales, it’s even easier to upgrade from the old time-wasting, money-losing, tail-chasing technology. Begin with my list above to determine which of the twenty you are guilty of, and just stop it.
Queue Bob Newhart and Stop It. One of the funniest videos EVER!
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