Todd Duncan's Sales Mistake #3: Tinkering

Duncan defines Tinkering as "Treating the symptoms but not the sickness of poor selling efforts." See Todd Duncan, Killing the Sale; the 10 Fatal Mistakes Salespeople make and how to avoid them. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2004), p 39.

Duncan claims tinkering is the most common mistake sales professionals make. Some examples from pp. 45-7:

>Trying to recover clients after sales fall through rather than trying to understand why clients are leaving.

>Trying to develop more scripts to overcome objectives rather than identifying prospects needs up front to prevent objections in the first place.

>Trying to overcome low sales by making more calls.

>Trying to work harder instead of smarter.

The solution: "Setting your standard and sticking to it....The more time you spend tinkering around," he says, "the more time you will have to produce successful sales." (p. 56)

There is no substitute for doing the hard work to understand how something should be done, then tracking outcomes and evaluating results and feeding that back into your understanding efforts. You should always be evaluating your proceedures, linking them to outcomes and goals.

He outlines how to really fix sales problems.

What do you think about this? Have you ever been guilty of posing? I'm trying to create more skilled entrepreneurs. Do you think this helps?

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.