Are Your Organizational Sales Habits Positive or Negative

Goldsmith, Brown and Hawkins identify 16 negative habits that relentlessly harm a customer’s sales experience. Removing even one or two can extremely improve your sales and persuading skills.

1. Failure to be present: recurring and irritating displays of behavior that makes the customer feel “we’d rather be somewhere else”.
2. Vocal filler: the abuse of unnecessary and empty words
3. Selling past the close: the tempting impulse to articulate and implement every single possible step in the sales process
4. Selective hearing: apparently not listening in the customer
5. Contact without purpose: repetitive, slow communication for no effective business reason (other than wanting to sell something)
6. Curb qualifying: the tendency to judge a ones funds and purpose quickly, from a distance
7. Using pressure as a tool: also known as “sale ends Saturday”
8. One-upping: the continuous need to show the world just how smart you are
9. Over confident: the use of unsuitably intimate gestures
10. Withholding passion and energy: the inclination to forget that people make choices on the basis of emotion and later defend them with reason
11. Explaining failure: behaving under the inaccurate belief that merely assigning blame, fault or guilt is adequate to please the customer
12. Never having to say you’re sorry: an inability to apologize or accept responsibility for personal or organizational mistakes/wrongs
13. Throwing others under the bus: sacrificing a coworker – often unidentified, defenseless and usually innocent – to cover up a functional failure
14. Propagandizing: relying to much on organizational rhetoric and themes
15. Wasting energy: being a part of  organizational blame-storming and pity parties
16. Fixating over the numbers: attaining revenue, earnings or productivity targets at the expense of metrics of a higher calling

How to Overcome a Bad Habit

It’s never easy to form a new habit, but you can effortlessly select to stop a bad one. Here is the secret: Never try to change everything at one time. Remember to use the rule of three With the rule of three, you identify three of your bad habits and pledge to stop doing them.

Analysis the 16 bad sales habits mentioned above, and you’ll discover that they usually show an additional or scarcity in either information or emotion. We typically share too much information or not enough emotion, or vice versa. Where do see your behaviors fit on the scale?
Below is a four-step action plan to counteract bad habits:

1. Gather data. Take note of the unexpected comments others make about you. These comments contain key information that can help you advance your communications.
2. Find or develop a “mute button.” Allow seven seconds of quietness to pass during your next conversation. This gap will help you pay attention more carefully instead of mentally working on how you will respond. You can also use this time to recognize the body language of the individual you are speaking with.
3. Note your own self-deception. Each of us disagrees with certain behaviors which will protect ourselves from uneasiness. Recognize what you can do – and stop doing – to achieve even greater success.
4. Work with a trusted peer, mentor or coach. Personal change seldom occurs when we work by ourselves. If it does happen, it’s typically more difficult to endure.

Follow-Up Works

While there’s no doubt that training prepares today’s work force with improved communication and customer-relationship skills, permanent transformation also requires coaching and follow-up. Professionals who received training, coaching and follow-up experienced 20 times more progress than those who received training only.

The high-tech, low-touch tactic to customer interaction is deteriorating miserably. Customers may prefer a brand, but they are dedicated to people. Electronic customer-service systems may be appropriate and cost-effective, but their helplessness to solve real-life problems is coming back to haunt many businesses.
Mastery of your job’s useful arena allows you to enter the game, but your helpfulness in the human arena helps you remain on the field – and win.