3 Common Field Sales Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

3.Selling becomes easy when you know what you should do. It becomes easier when you know what you should never do. As a field salesman, when you know what mistakes could make you bite the dust, you tend to avoid them at all cost and stick to the best practices.

The current selling situation is a mixture of buying experience, salesmanship, customer insight, and digital technology. Every field sales-focused organization is trying to take control of the situation in order to increase sales.

Not an easy task though, considering the fact that even the slightest mistake could be a big turn off for the prospect. If you are into field sales, why not make yourself familiar with key selling mistakes and the practices that could help you avoid them.

Enlisted below is the 3 common field sales mistakes and how you can avoid them to increase your chances of selling to a prospect and create a difference in your sales productivity levels.

1. Broken Sales Process

It is possible that there is nothing wrong in your selling tactics and yet you are not able to achieve your quota. Apparently, all your effort is going down the drain. But why is so?

Maybe because your sales process is broken, which is causing this leakage. It technically counts as your mistake as in most cases there are clear signs of a broken field sales process.

Not being able to recognize the signs of the broken field sales process is clearly the worst-selling mistake. But what are those signs and how can you identify them?

Here are some quick tips: do you think your field sales manager has not defined the sales productivity level clearly? Any sign of ambiguity in the field sales process indicates a broken process. It could be in any aspect of the process, such as scheduling and work order management and territory management.

Use of digital sales tools, such as field sales software and Field sales app, are helpful in identifying cracks in the process, which your revenue can slip through without any apparent reason.

2. Poor Prospecting

Do you think there is a huge gap between marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads in your business?

If finger-pointing between sales and marketing teams are a common scenario in your organization, time to revisit the entire lead generation process that begins with identifying the targeted audience for your business.

But when the marketing qualified leads are true to their profile, chances are you are at fault of poor prospecting. As a field sales professional, you need to take a good hold on your prospect once it enters into the sales pipeline.

The key to success is asking the right questions, such as what are they looking in the right product, what is their budget, who are the key users and what is the urgency of their requirement.

A field sales mobile app can help you in sales pipeline management, enabling you to categorize your best prospects who have higher chances of conversion.

3. Overselling

You can’t be a pushy salesperson especially when we are living in the era of the commodity trap. For every single product, there are several similar products available in the market.

When a prospect feels the pressure from you, chances are they resort to ghosting or simply negate buying from you. In a selling scenario, when the competition is high and selling tough, you can’t take the risk of upsetting a prospective buyer.

Often it has been observed that when the customer has shown direct interest in buying, some non-related talk straight out from the salesperson has led them to change their mind. While conversing with customers, the salesman must ensure to avoid political and religious conversations at all cost.

The best way to deal with this is to adopt the listen and assess approach. In this approach, you have to listen to the prospective buyers and assess their intentions, and based on the assessment make your recommendations. You can use field sale app to note down your assessments and move the buyer further in your sales process.

Wrapping Up

Once a lead becomes your prospect, never lose the sight of your goal. Be focused, neither take too much time to respond nor keep on talking, as it could divert the attention. And wherever possible, seek support in technology.

In modern selling scenario, use of the latest technology will help you in sales pipeline management, product performance analysis, and identifying the causes of retention and churn rate.