What Do You Need to Unlearn This Year?

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What Do You Need to Unlearn This Year?

An Open Mind Selling is a learning-based profession. The key to mastering your craft as a sales professional is to constantly learn new perspectives on selling and master new sales skills. It is important to take the time to inventory your current strengths and weaknesses and assess what you need to learn to help you develop more prospects and close more orders.

At the same time it is important to have an open mind about the unproductive sales beliefs and practices that you should eliminate, or “unlearn,” that waste your limited selling time and decrease your upside sales potential. You have to perform an honest self-assessment and ask yourself: What do I need to unlearn this year?

Here are a few examples of counter-productive sales beliefs, behaviors and practices that I encounter in my work with clients as a sales coach that need to be unlearned:

1. Marketing-generated sales leads are worthless. It is invariably a sign of trouble when salespeople say that the only good sales lead is the one they developed themself. Once upon a time there may have been some validity to this point of view. But not now. Potential prospects have the information at their disposal to substantially pre-educate themselves about products and services before they ever reach out to engage with a seller. When they initiate contact they are well into their buying process and need to be taken seriously.

2. There is always time to respond to leads and customers. There isn’t. The operating assumption for you, the salesperson, has to be that prospects are making decisions based, at least in part, on how effectively you utilize their time. Waiting for you constitutes a bad use of their time. If the prospect invests time in you, and you make good use of that time, they will reward you with additional time in order to continue selling. Your prospects have plenty of options. Waste their time at your peril.

3. Customer relationships are built on interpersonal skills. This needs to be unlearned in a hurry. At the end of the day relationships with prospects and customers are based on Needs and Deeds (link to post). You can be as personable and sincere as the day is long but if you aren’t meeting the prospect’s needs, you won’t develop a productive, long-term relationship with them. The best salesperson I’ve seen in action in the past decade was pathologically shy. But he knew his products and understood his customers and was able to guide them through their buying cycle faster than his competitors.

4. It is all about the product. It isn’t. In most instances, the customer could care less about your particular product. What they care about is whether you, and your product or service, can provide the optimal solution to their problem. Whether the solution they buy is your product or a product from the World-Wide Widget Company, doesn’t make a difference to them.

What do you have to unlearn this year?

Andy Paul is author of the award-winning book, Zero-Time Selling: 10 Essential Steps to Accelerate Every Company’s Sales. A sought-after speaker and business coach, Andy conducts workshops and consults with sales teams of all sizes to teach them how to use responsiveness, speed and intelligent processes to increase sales. Enjoy what you just read? Sign up for our regular digest of valuable Zero-Time Selling sales tips and strategies, “Selling with Maximum Impact.”