How To Avoid Surprise Sales Losses for sale by owner

One of the worst things that can happen to you as a sales person is a surprise loss.Your job as a

sales person is to be in control of your sale:
To know what's going on in the sale,
To influence it to a close for you if possible ,
To get out early if the sale is unwinnable.

A surprise loss means that you wasted valuable sales time. Time that could have and should have been used towards better quality sales deals.

A surprise loss not only takes away valuable time from other deals but it also damages your reputation. You will have a hard time getting bigger and better territories and products to sell if management thinks that you can't be counted on to make the sale.

To avoid surprise losses, you must possess what Napoleon Hill called Accurate Thinking in his book "The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons":

Accurate thought involves two fundamentals which all who indulge in it must observe. First, to think accurately you must separate facts from mere information. There is much 'information' available to you that is not based on facts. Second, you must separate facts into two classes; namely the important and the unimportant, or, the relevant and the irrelevant.

Accurate Thinking - Seeing Things as They Really Are

To avoid surprise losses then, you must be able to see your sales as they really are. Not as you wish they might be. Not as you fear they might be.

Once you have committed yourself to a sale, you must always be evaluating the information you are getting from and about your prospect, and you must be willing to walk away from a sale when it becomes clear that is unwinnable.

Some people may say that all sales are winnable. That is not realistic however. That is not accurate thinking.

Every potential sale is best for one or two competitors likely to be considered and less than optimal for others.

And the truth about your prospects is that they usually figure this out.

You need to always be asking yourself the main question that your prospect is asking.

And that is, "Is my product the best fit for what they are looking for?

"This is the paramount question that is being asked by every prospect in every sale you engage.To help you accurately answer this question, you should also be asking both of yourself (and more importantly of your prospect) " What is the real problem that the prospect wants to solve?

Prospects Don't Tell You Everything You Need To Hear

Prospects don't always tell you this.They usually tell you what product they want.

In other words, they think that they know how to solve their problem by purchasing a product like one you sell, which is why they are talking to you.

So they tell you what they need to purchase - they don't normally volunteer a discussion about the problem(s) that motivated them to want a product like the one you sell.

To be able to accurately assess if you are the best fit for your prospect, you need to know the precise nature of the problem(s) they desire to solve.

When you know this and you know your competitors well, you can accurately decide whether or not you should pursue a sale to a close or not.

And when you do, you will avoid time draining and career damaging surprise losses.

Sales Lesson Plans from a Painful Loss

Failure sucks.

There are generally some great sales lessons to be learned in most any failure though if you are strong enough to look objectively.

At one "hot" sales job I had I made a major mistake.

8 states in the northwestern US were my sales territory. This included Colorado (which has some phenomenal skiing).

I didn't seek it out, but a prominent ski resort near Vail Colorado came in as a sales lead.

Pretty cool I thought.

So of course I engaged the sale.

Over a period of months (most of them during ski season) I made 4 or 5 expensive sales trips to sell a business software system to that ski resort.

I should have been able to close that sale in 2 or 3 trips.

But the deal never closed.

In fact I bulldogged that deal way too long.

I got blinded a bit by the how cool I thought it would be to land this ski resort as a customer.
I also didn't listen to my sales intuition.

Turns out that the business director I was working with never could get the money approved by her board of directors.

She thought she could change their decision, but she didn't have the guts to tell me this.
And I had yet to find the nuts to continue asking hard questions like this at that my point in my sales career.

I mainly relied on my own belief that persistence was on of my greatest strengths. I sort of believed that if I just kept after a deal long enough, then I could get it.

Everyone in my small company new about this deal I was working.

So the loss turned out to be quite embarrassing.

Through this loss, I learned at an emotional, gut level, three important sales lessons that some of the smarter senior sales people I knew had been telling me for a long time.

Sales Lesson #1Don't Fall in Love With Any Deal
It's easy when you are in the heat of a sale, to get seduced by the prospect.
Sometimes this happens because the sale would be a nice feather in your cap (like in my case the name-brand ski resort).

Other times you get seduced chasing a really, really, really large sale.
Or yet you may simply get seduced by great rapport with your primary sales contact that makes you think you're a shoe-in for the sale.

Unfortunately, when you fall in love with a deal you block yourself from being able to follow the next two lessons...

Sales Lesson #2Ask Hard Questions Throughout the Sale

Had I continued asking and re-asking budget and approval related questions over-time, I would have found out months earlier that this deal had gone bad.
I could have gotten out on my own terms, and at least saved my reputation for being in control of my sales.

Instead, I had to explain my now high-profile loss to my Sales VP, my President and my CEO. I had to own up to how I muffed it by hanging on too long.

Sales Lesson #3Have the Courage to Walk at Any Time

You must have the courage to walk from at any time.

You should have rules for what is a good prospect, what is a good sale, what is a good customer.

If your rules aren't being met, and if you can't change things in your favor with a reasonable effort, then walk.

You cannot close every sale. But you can stay in control of the sales process.
When you do so, you preserve your energy, your motivation and your reputation.

The psychology of words has an important impact on every presentation. You will learn the different psychological reasons behind each of the following examples in the subsequent analysis. These statements, to the untrained eye, may seem like innocent and even sometimes unimportant or silly lines in the story to be told, but they have been carefully crafted for their psychological impact.

The underlying concepts, in these illustrations, are used by many marketers and very successfully. As you read them, some of the words may sound familiar, and that is because they are. However, now you will be privy to the underlying reasoning behind their use. The theories apply universally so you can use them for any product or service you want. For this demonstration let's use a clam shell as our product and call it the screaming clam shell.
Allow for the fact that you have arrived at the sales presentation for more information, as
you would have in real life for any product or service, where a small ad or banner was
successful in getting you this far.

Your product is the finest clam shell available, harvested only from the best East Coast screaming clams, and you have discovered many unique uses for it. The sales presentation could open something like this: "I have to tell you I was stunned. Really shocked! I usually try to not have things dictate my moods but only a week after receiving my clam shell I found myself very angry." This type opening is used often in longer sales letter type presentations. It sets up various reader responses, which we will examine, and does so immediately. At this point, the psychology is to have you continue your reading out of curiosity. I mean, what's up with this? You want to find out more. You continue on.