I’ve been on the end of some pretty spectacularly bad sales experiences recently and the reasons they were bad is because they involved some or other of the below.  How many do you recognise?

1. Making you feel guilty

Depending on the type of product or service you sell, the sales process involves a journey to a client meeting and it can be a long one (it’s not unusual to drive 2-3 hours or more to have a face-to-face meeting).  Never harp on to your client about your journey though; it’s not their fault you’re not based locally to them and you’re just going to make them feel guilty.  Businesses don’t generally buy based on guilt.

2. Telling you everything they know about their product

Unfortunately you get this in IT and technology and lot; the salesperson wants to show you exactly how much they know about their product and they won’t be happy until they’ve demoed every single thing.  Two hours later everyone in the meeting is yawning (they switched off 1hr 45mins ago) and the salesperson has no more idea of what is important to their audience than when they first walked in – they haven’t asked and they certainly haven’t listened.

3. Telling you nothing at all about their product!

Conversely, you also get the situation where the salesperson doesn’t seem to be able to tell you anything about the product.  No-one expects the salesperson to have an in-depth, technical knowledge of the product and it’s fine to say “I don’t know the answer to that but I will put you in contact with one of our experts who will be able to help”.  However, they should have a basic knowledge of what it will do for you and how it will help.  (N.B. the salesperson who just agrees and says that the product will do absolutely everything the client wants is no good either – that’s usually called mis-selling!).

4. Making assumptions

You can get great, experienced salespeople who know their market, know their product, know the likely objections that will come up and know how to respond to them.  The problem here though is that all this knowledge often stops them from asking the questions they once would, assuming they know the answer.  And if you don’t ask questions you’ll never really understand what your clients want so stand a much smaller chance of being able to come up with a value proposition which meets their needs.  Always ask questions.

5. Hassling

This doesn’t take much explanation but it still happens all the time, everywhere you go.  Have you ever bought anything because you were hassled into it?  Thought not.  By all means, follow up the meeting, send your clients everything you said you were going to and keep your promises.  But don’t cross the line into hassling, they’ll just stop answering their phone.