But salespeople often tend to exaggerate, misinterpret, or overestimate their products and services in trying to win the sale. Such behaviors repel the buyers and break the deals. To avoid such circumstances in your business, you must know about the common deal-breakers and the ways to avoid them. Here are some of them:
1.Focusing on Price Rather Than Value
You can surely offer discounts and offers to your customers. But if you go too low just to impress and compel them to buy from you, you are reducing your product’s perceived value. Don’t rely on low prices, heavy discounts, special offers, etc. Otherwise, you will lose your customers when someone else offers them a bigger discount.
How to avoid: You must instead persuade the customers based on the problems you can solve for them through your offerings and explain to them the consequences of not doing so now. They need a valuable product and not a cheap one. If the value is substantial for them, they will be ready to pay higher prices.
2.Not Handling Objections
Salespeople often view objections as hurdles in the sales process. But they don’t realize that the prospects voicing their objections are a sign that they might be interested and engaged in the product offerings. If they are raising objections, they are paying attention to what you say, trying to learn about the products and services, and analyzing the purchase.
How to avoid: By addressing objections, salespeople get a chance to know the things that would otherwise hold their prospects back from the purchase. Hence, objections should be treated as opportunities to learn more about the prospects and respond to their dispositions. Understand the common objections you come across in the sales process, and find the underlying problem and resolution.
3.Not Leveraging Social Proofs
Often, pushing your leads to the conversion phase needs trust-building. For many prospects, their peers’ opinions and/or testimonials help them drive trust. As per statistics, peer recommendations influence over 90% of customers’ buying decisions.
How to avoid: Leveraging social proof can help you win their confidence, and consequently the deal, quicker. Your prospects are more likely to respond to their mutual contacts rather than a random email introducing your company. You can also send them case studies or performance stats of a success story as evidence of how your products have benefited others. Post regular positive reviews from your brand ambassadors on your social media as a way to win deals.
4.Not Having a Robust Negotiation Strategy
Confident and effective negotiation is vital when closing a deal in sales. It often happens that salespeople have much knowledge about their prospects as well as their products and services. But they lack a solid strategy to use that information during sales negotiations.
How to avoid: Formulate a game plan; plan a cheat sheet with your product’s USP, common competitor concerns, industry standards, and market.
Your negotiation should be flexible but should not cross all the boundaries. For instance, the prospects should not be able to press you for unprofitable prices. Salespeople often give up after hearing the first ‘no,’ which can be another major deal breaker. Getting a rejection could mean the prospects need more information on how the products can meet their pain points. Help them understand why the products can be valuable to them.
5.Trying Too Hard to Sell
Salespeople often cross the line between being pushy and persistent while closing the deal in sales. Persistence refers to being constantly ready to tackle issues, offer solutions, follow up, etc. Whereas being pushy is when you try too hard to sell to your customers, argue with them, and aggressively force them to buy. Some sales reps might even be compelled to make unsolicited phone calls to the customers in a desperate attempt to sell.
How to avoid: You should know that your prospects can feel your desperation when you need a sale. Thus, you must focus on understanding your customers’ pain points, be open to their doubts, and give them time to consider the purchase. Consider creating urgency by offering a limited-time discount to turn difficult prospects around.
6.Not Having Pricing Model Transparency
Businesses usually never disclose their pricing information to customers.
How to avoid: The customers appreciate it when you offer them clarity about your pricing models upfront. You can even publish your pricing model on your website. It represents an intimate disclosure and helps build trust, which enhances their willingness to purchase from your brand. As per a recent study, pricing model transparency can increase your sales by 20%!
7.Difficult-To-Sign Contract
How to avoid: You must make the contracting process as easy on your prospects as possible and highlight the critical terms, key clauses, and negotiated terms for easy understanding.
Guide them before, during, and after the contracting process and address their concerns. One way to provide all the critical contact information in an easy-to-understand format for the prospects is by sending a short email with summary bullets.
8.Not Asking the Right Questions
Sales reps often neglect genuine leads and waste time chasing the wrong ones. Asking the right questions is very important to filter out the quality leads from the rest while closing the deal in sales.
How to avoid: To identify the real prospects, you must ask them questions about-
- When they want to buy a product,
- If they have the means and resources to do so,
- Why they need the product,
- Who would be using it,
- What (if any) were the solutions they tried earlier, etc.
By asking such questions, you will know how serious the prospects are about making the purchase and solving their problems, and if they are worth investing your time and effort in.
9.Not Getting a Commitment To Sign
A deal goes nowhere if customers keep making vague promises to “get back sometime later” or “think about the proposal.” When you are committing your own and your company’s time and resources on a sales call, you must also be able to get a similar commitment from the prospects.
How to avoid: You can ask them to schedule a follow-up on a specified date, for instance, or how they would describe the sales process so far, if anything could have been done better for them, etc., to know how committed they are to act.
Here’s the Checklist of the Top 9 Deal breakers:
1. Focusing on Price Rather Than Value
2. Not Handling Objections
3. Not Leveraging Social Proofs
4. Not Having a Robust Negotiation Strategy
5. Trying Too Hard to Sell
6. Not Having Pricing Model Transparency
7. Difficult-To-Sign Contracts
8. Not Asking the Right Questions
9. Not Getting a Commitment To Sign
To find out more about the major deal-breakers and ways to avoid them effectively, download the below ebook and contact the best sales consulting company in Bangalore.