Fundamentally, these six principles incorporate the 24 sales truths. The trick is to identify and avoid the sales traps in order to improve your performance-company, team, or individual.

learning sales effectiveness. Every week I am asked some version of the question, What am I doing wrong? Specifically, Im asked the following three questions every week by salespeople:

1. What am I (is our team, our department, our organization, our company) doing wrong-so that I (we) can stop doing it?

2. What am I (is our organization) doing right-so that I (we) can continue doing it and improve upon it?

3. How do I (we) know whats correct-based on the research, not just an opinion?

The goal of The 24 Sales Traps and How to Avoid Them is to answer these questions. If you want to see results, you need to fix your mistakes. Start by avoiding the 24 sales traps in this book. The 24 Sales Traps and How to Avoid Them puts a counterintuitive emphasis on what salespeople do wrong because in sales, especially at advanced levels, there are so many ways to do things right. There are many fewer ways to do things wrong.

Finally, if this book does nothing else, I hope it causes you to see your sales piece differently, to see what youve been doing in a new light, so that you can be more effective. The reason to change your behavior based on the sales truths is simple: They work. In sales, actions based on fallacies, mistaken beliefs, and half-truths dont work. When salespeople believe and do the wrong thing, they often fall into one or more of these 24 sales traps.

PRINCIPLE

adopt an

outside

focus

SUCCESSFUL sales teams focus their energies outside the company. The efforts of sales and marketing appear seamless; they appear to be one entity, not two, when solving customer needs.

customers come first

Leading sales teams focus on customers buying preferences, requirements, and needs before focusing on their own targets. They place their focus outside of their organizations by following their customers buying trends. Less stellar sales organizations focus inside their organizations and then figure out how to

capture the customers. For example, people in these less stellar organizations place more emphasis on internal paperwork to cover their behinds than on quickly and effectively solving customer issues. In contrast, sales leaders make their customers requirements and needs their priority, then align their sales and marketing operations and processes to best address those needs.

For example, Dell Computer Corporation stays abreast with- if not ahead of-the buying requirements and patterns of its customers. Michael Dell recognized in the early 1980s that his targeted customer base didnt see the value of a faster processor. He changed strategic direction from creating faster processors to making computers available over the phone. He recognized that there were many customers who were knowledgeable enough to order their computer solutions directly from Dell over the phone (and eventually over the Net). Thus, Dell has become a giant by focusing on what it knows its customers want and aligning the company to meet those requirements, rather than focusing on what it thinks its customers want.

Sales forces should focus on solutions, not on particular products. When products that are needed to solve key customer problems do not exist and must be developed, the products should be developed by the marketing departments but in concert with the customers.

focus on solutions

Salespeople should focus much more heavily on product solutions than on features and advantages. An excellent example of this is IBMs sales force, because it focuses on solutions and not on pushing products. Likewise, Xeroxs salespeople thoroughly probe to understand the customers needs today and in the future before they talk about new products, new features, new pricing on old products, and so on. Such salespeople are walking problem solvers rather than talking brochures.