Three Ways Your Sales Team Will Ruin Your Business | Conrey is ...

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Is your sales team killing your business? Seems counterintuitive, but sadly it is more common that you think. There are many ways they can kill your business in the exploding-train-derailment sort of way, but most of you know how to prevent those. What you are probably missing are these three ways your sales team is killing you slowly:

1. Saying Yes to Every Deal: Raise your hand if you think your sales team?s job is to go out and get every piece of business that they can find. Now those of you raising your hand please take that hand and smack yourself. Your sales team?s job is to go out and get the right business for you to complete. It is just as much a function of their job to protect you and your business from bad deals as it is to close good ones. Don?t be afraid to say no to a deal that is going to be more harm than it?s worth.
2. Lowering Your Prices: As a sales manager or business owner have you ever had a salesman come in and say ?We can win this deal, but only if we drop our price to ?.?? Remember that hand you raised earlier and smacked yourself with? Hit them with it next time they ask this. I?m guessing you had a pretty good idea of what you thought your value proposition was when you sent them out into the wild to sell for you. Lowering your prices is a great way to bleed off margin, make for additional stress for everyone in accounting, and kill any chance you have of making the right money on this customer or any referrals they send. More importantly, the first time you lower the price it will feel really bad, you?ll think about it for a while, and then ultimately decide it?s the right play. But the second time it?s not so hard, and it gets progressively easier until without even realizing it you?ve lowered your bar entirely.
3. The Client is Always Right: Yup, the tried and true mantra of customer service will kill you. I?m all for pleasing and delighting the customer as much as the next guy, but if you?ve failed at one or both of the above things, my guess is you?ve got clients in the pool who are demanding more of your time or product for less return, holding you hostage for payments because they want ?one more thing?, or generally making your life hell because they?re never quite happy. Remember that clients are made just like you and I, human and imperfect. They?ll be wrong just as often as you, and while you shouldn?t go pointing out all of their flaws, you should be willing to draw a line in the sand when you have to. Sometimes you just have the better position to fight from.

No go forth and diagnose these problems within your organization and make the changes to prevent them from leading to a slow painful death.

Source: http://www.chrisconrey.com/three-ways-your-sales-team-will-ruin-your-business/

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