Todd Duncan's 10 Fatal Selling Errors

Todd Duncan, in Killing the Sale; the 10 Fatal Mistakes Salespeople Make and How to Avoid Them. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2004), lays out 10 basic selling errors. Entrepreneurs should recognize them so they don't do them.

Here they are:

1. Hyping: "Relying on 'You can do it' propaganda to maintain your sales motivation.' (p.1)

2. Posing: "Trying to sell before training to sell." (p. 17)

3. Tinkering: "Treating the symptoms but not the sickness of poor selling efforts." (p. 39)

4. Moonlighting: Buliding a business-based life instead of a life-based busines. (p. 61)

5. Muscling: Taking Lone Ranger actions instead of using team-connected strategies. (p. 83)

6. Arguing: Selling your product before knowing your customer. (p. 103)

7. Gambling: Making unplanned calls on unknown customers. (p. 123)

8. Begging: Seeking your customers' business before earning your customers' trust. (p. 141)

9. Skimming: Focusing of surface profitability instead of client satisfaction. (p. 159)

10. Stagnating: Losing your sales edge by neglecting your growth curve. (p. 181)

There's not one salesman who hasn't been guilty of none of these. All of us have done every one of them at one point in time.

The key is to keep them in your mind and recognize them when you're either doing them or contemplating on doing them.

But if you recognize your core values and act according to them as often as possible, you'll maximize your chances of never doing any of them.

I'm going to go over each one in subsequent posts. Entrepreneurship is a sales business. Need I say more?

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

This material comes from 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.

Relationship Marketing

Marketing relationships is in tune with the times. Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia describes it as

A form of marketing developed from direct response marketing campaigns conducted in the 1970's and 1980's which emphasizes customer retention and satisfaction, rather than a dominant focus on 'point of sale' transactions. Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value to the firm of keeping customers, as opposed to direct or "Intrusion" marketing, which focuses upon acquisition of new clients by targeting majority demographics based upon prospective client lists.

That says it all. If you're interested in this, read the whole Wikipedia article and follow its links. Also google it because there's a lot of stuff out there.

Todd Duncan, in Killing the Sale; The 10 Fatal Mistakes Salespeople Make and How to Avoid Them (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2004), a book I highly recommend, lists "Skimming" as mistake #9 out of ten. To Duncan, skimming is "focusing on surface profitability instead of client satisfaction." (p. 159) He rightly points out that salespeople focus all their attention on developing leads, converting them into prospects, then making presentation and closing sales. Then they forget all about them and go on to the next lead.

We were just talking about this at a party Sunday night. My client, who had put on this surprise party for his wife, paid me an amazing compliment when he said "You put a lot more effort into developing relationships than most realtors." I loved to hear that.

What do you think? I'd like to know. Am I voice crying in the wilderness here? Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs all my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com and for entrepreneurial writing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.