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.

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.