Todd Duncan's Fatal Sales Mistake #10: Stagnating

"Stagnating" is Todd Duncan's tenth fatal sales mistake. See: Todd Duncan, Killing the Sale; the 10 Fatal Mistakes Salespeople Make and How to Avoid Them (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2004), pp. 181-198.

Duncan defines stagnating on p. 181 as "Losing your sales edge by neglecting your growth curve." He says, "Everything changes, all the time. Therefore, to overcome the fatal mistake of stagnating, so must you." [p. 191]

On pp. 192-195 Duncan gives four things to do so avoid stagnating

:1. Study your product like a consumer.

2. Survey your customers regularly.

3. Play the market. By this, he means, "become a buyer in your own market."

4. Survey Yourself Annually. Do an annual review of your skills, mission, everything. Obviously you will want your best clients playing the biggest part in helping you succeed."

I will add a fifth one. Read all the time. Read stuff coming out about your industry and be an expert. One of the things that differentiates us as our expertise and knowledge. If we don't keep abreast of customer trends we will lose. When the rate of change increases every day, staying abreast of things becomes harder and even more important.

What do you think about this? Are you becoming irrelevant? Post a comment to this blog.

This is some of the stuff that will go into my entrepreneurship course. The ideas in it supply the life's blood of my professional activities: teaching, writing, and real estate. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot/com.