They want to appear to have a silver-tongue sale pitch that’ll woo any client and can sell ice to an Eskimo. Failure seems non-existent, and they become the great closer their office always talks about around the water cooler.
But here’s the thing: if you’re always succeeding in sales, you’re doing it wrong.
To truly succeed, you need to push your sales tactics to failure to discover how to perfect your sales strategy and improve on your flaws. Without pushing yourself past your sales comfort zone, your sales will always be limited to the same results that will never allow your business to grow.
To become excellent at sales, you must fail. Here are a few of the benefits of mastering failure:
When you talk to a variety of people, you’ll get turned down for a variety of reasons.
Every client faces their own unique problems and brings a different perspective on common topics that might challenge the weakness of your product or sales pitch. The more potential customers you talk to, the more feedback you will receive.
This feedback is essential to perfecting your sales tactics, as it forces your sales pitch to become more dynamic and shifts your focus from just spewing out a generic pitch to being able to easily adjust how you pitch your product to align with your client’s viewpoint.
It’s critical to pitch at the client’s level if you can’t authentically talk to them, they won’t connect with you, let alone close a sale.
By reaching out to a wider audience, you’ll get more practice adjusting your pitch on the fly and will eventually be able to sell your product to just about anyone.
If you’re not on the hunt for new clients, you really don’t know what’s out there.
While referrals and repeat customers are essential for having a consistent income, focusing too much on your current network can stunt your growth.
If you’re not constantly trying to expand your customer base, you’re adding a self-imposed cap on your sales. Customers continually face a bombardment of products and advertising grappling for their attention and hardly have the bandwidth to seek out new products independently. If you just sit back and wait for customers to find you, you’ll be quickly overshadowed by other company’s expansive sales tactics.
Instead, test your limits by reaching out to customers outside your comfort zone. While this doesn’t automatically lead to more sales, your business will have greater odds for expansion, and you could perhaps even discover new audiences that will be a perfect fit for your product.
No one discovered anything while just sitting at home. Adventure into new markets and see how far you can push your sales.
Believe it or not, you don’t want every customer.
Just because a customer will buy your product or service doesn’t mean they’re necessarily the right fit Some paying customers will have goals or expectations that won’t align with your company, ultimately leading to more trouble than the sale was worth through increased customer service demands or unhappy reviews due to a poor-fitting product.
Determining which customers you don’t want is almost as important as learning which customers you want. Sorting through the bad batches of customers allows you not to waste your time on the wrong audiences and gives you the confidence to double down on the perfect customer base for your business.
However, you’ll only discover which customers are wrong for your business by constantly expanding your sales outreach. Sorting through the bad apples of your potential clients will only make finding the right ones so much sweeter.
Sure, it feels good to have sales right now, but what’s the end goal?
For any business, the end goal for your sales team shouldn’t be just increasing your sales numbers. While this is obviously important, the other side of your sales goals should be perfecting your sales system.
When you focus on creating a sales system, you’ll be able to increase the automation of your sales process and spend exponentially less energy on selling your product with the same sales results. Once your sales process becomes efficient, you can upscale your system to improve your sales with far less effort considerably. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right?
However, a fully functional sales system takes much trial and error. Constructing the perfect sales system requires previous sales knowledge of what tactics have succeeded in the past, what the ideal clientele for your product is, and how far-reaching your audience is.
Once each of these aspects of your sales process is properly tested, evaluate your sales knowledge and figure out what aspects of your process you can automate. Once each stage of your sales process is at its most efficient level, you will combine these stages to create a definitive sales system that can be easily repeatable and still produce great results.
Creating an effective sales system might sound a little easier said than done, but it’s completely doable for any business. All it takes is pushing your sales tactics and a healthy dose of failure.