Not Closing Deals? You May Have Fallen Into One of These 3 Sales Traps

Forbes

2 days ago

BERLIN, GERMANY - AUGUST 07: Two men in business business suits shaking hands on August 07, 2014 in ... More Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)
If you work in sales and you're frustrated and struggling to close deals it's probably because you have fallen into one or more of three common sales traps: You're telling, you're accepting, or you're guessing.
I should know, like most folks with long careers in sales, I learned my lesson the hard way: Only collaboration really works.
Buyers and sellers both want a solution that benefits both parties. But too often, sellers and buyers conspire against one another. Buyers complain that sellers exaggerate and set false expectations. That they don't listen. That they even lie. Sellers complain that buyers withhold information and don't offer access to key stakeholders—that they too don't listen and sometimes lie.
At the heart of this disconnect is a lack of collaboration, caused by an overabundance of telling, accepting, and guessing. Let me explain:
By telling, I mean you talk too much. Have you ever read an AI-generated meeting report and discovered that you spoke for 70 percent of the total call time?
Too often, salespeople tell customers what their problem is and how to solve it. It's a common sales trap. You may deny it but deep down you may in fact believe that it is your job to tell the potential buyer what they should do. The problem is, buyers will listen as you drone on, seemingly happy to be told what they need to do. (More likely, they have checked out, using their meeting with you as a respite from the more intense parts of their day).
Don't let an occasional success fool you. Winning a sale by rambling on about your solution is about as reliable as a GPS with no signal. You may get there but only through luck. More often, your outpouring of words and paragraphs is completely off the mark, and you won't find out what's happened until you've lost the deal. In fact, you may never know why you lost.
The problem with too much telling is it doesn't allow for enough time for listening to understand the client's challenge. As speaking coach Anne Sugar wrote in the Harvard Business Review, when you talk too much, 'Your ideas get lost because stakeholders lose patience with your habit of dominating the conversation—and start to tune you out.'
Sugar offers some tips to improve outcomes. First, measure how long you talk. If you hit three minutes, stop! Maybe set rules, like, I won't talk until two other views are shared. Consider other ways to share your views, whether that's a chart, a link dropped into the chat or a subsequent meeting. Practice compressing your ideas. How would you get your idea across in a tweet, for example? Leave pauses for others to chime in. Finally, ask for feedback and/or help from a trusted colleague.
I have a favorite variation on Sugar's advice about leaving pauses for others to chime in: Ask a straightforward question, and then shut up. Count to seven before saying another word to ensure the buyer has ample opportunity to gather their thoughts and answer fully. (Guess what? They almost always tell you something you didn't know!)
'Accepting' is the tendency to take the buyer's stated needs at face value—without probing more deeply or challenging assumptions. It's especially common during the RFP (request for proposal) process, in which clients outline priorities and selection criteria in writing. Sellers are often eager to respond and consider it a show of strength to accept an RFP without equivocation. But in many meetings I've attended, it's clear the decision makers haven't even read their own RFP. It's often based on guesswork—or maybe it's a standard template. In fact, they could benefit from help understanding options they haven't yet considered or having an outsider's perspective on a solution's relevance to their needs.
Instead, a salesperson should be willing to voice concerns when they lack enough information to make an appropriate bid. Stating such reservations clearly and asking for meetings with the critical stakeholders—especially those most closely aligned with the actual end-user community— can help elevate the RFP process—transforming it from an exercise in gatekeeping to something far more useful and generative.
Start with a softening statement, perhaps complimenting the client's effort to assemble the RFP and thanking them for the opportunity to respond. With that done, however, it's also OK to note that the RFP raised many questions. Rather than run the risk of misinterpreting and giving inaccurate answers, you could suggest, it might help everybody for us to set up some focused 20-minute conversations to better align with additional key decision makers.
No doubt, some companies will decline to provide such access. But those instances are rare in my experience, and never make much sense to me. Doesn't the company want the best proposals? Either way, you get credit for your focus on meeting their needs.
We've all done it. We meet the client, hustle back to the office fired up, and gather the team to discuss the new opportunity. What follows then are questions. Dozens of them. What exactly does the client need? What's their budget? Who is our competition? What's their current solution? How will they make their decision? And yet, despite the lack of clarity, we rush forward and prepare what I call the guessing document—a proposal listing services that may or may not be helpful to the client.
Instead, politely—intentionally—seek the meetings you need to get answers to the questions that will enable you to build a meaningful and relevant proposal.
Collaboration Is for Closers We are far more likely to think of workplace collaboration as something that happens intramurally—within our own shops. But workplace collaboration is something to strive for with clients, and potential clients, too. The same activities that produce win-win outcomes inside your organization and set you on path to conquering your BHAGs, can also be applied to the advance work you do with clients.
Workplace collaboration can take many forms, each demanding a different level of effort and depth but all guaranteed to lead to a better outcome. Activities include:
Of course, collaboration is only possible where there is trust. I've written on this many times before, but our founder Stephen R. Covey surely put it best: 'Without trust we don't truly collaborate; we merely coordinate or, at best, cooperate.'
In sales, the obstacles to establishing trust and enabling collaboration may be greater, but the rewards are equally substantial. The idea is this: Instead of telling, accepting, and guessing, pursue mutual exploration.
Success starts when buyers and sellers share what they believe to be true, bringing their expertise together to collaborate on finding the best solution. Only then can we take the time to listen and learn everything we need to know about the client so we can provide them with our insights.
Only once we have collaborated can we hope to shift gears and talk about making a sale.