Increase Sales Blog

Posts Tagged ‘ethics and beliefs’

Sales research indicating:

• 50% of all sales leads are left to wither on the vine to die
• 80% of all salesperson stop after the 3rd contact
• 30%-70% of all sales targets are not achieved

What this suggests to me is there is a just a lot of plain laziness out there in the marketplace and very few people are talking about this using this word.

Laziness is so prevalent in our society (U.S.) I am surprised that anything gets down.  The majority of people are born both mentally and physically fit.  However due to a variety of reasons, laziness takes over. With the prevalent entitlement mentality, productivity suffers while other costs such as health care to the price of retail goods continue to spiral upward.  The U.S. and even Britain’s obesity rates confirm this change in behavior and the additional costs.

Just look at the parking lot of any grocery or retail store. How many carts are left stranded in parking places because someone was just to darn lazy to return the cart to one of those cart holding stands?

This laziness also has a much deeper meaning and that is total, 100% disrespect for all those other shoppers who have to weave around those unintended shopping carts.  (Think ethics and beliefs) Heavens forbid if it is a windy day and a sudden gust takes the cart and slams it into your vehicle or worse yet child! My sense is many of those lazy people would be the first to complain if their car damaged or their child harm by a stray shopping cart.

When people are lazy in sales, in  business and in life, their behaviors affect everyone else because of their poor business ethics. This is why it is important to focus on what you can control and have an action plan to support that focus.

As one final note for this Friday’s editorial, if you choose to be lazy, then do not expect others to pick up your slack.  For you have 100% of what actions you take from picking up that phone to call a potential customer to what food you place into your mouth.  Personal responsibility and accountability are key attributes or talents not only for professional sales people but everyone else as well.

Yesterday, I had an interesting experience which once again confirmed to me that top sales performers are few and far between. I received another one of those let us catapult your website to outer space email blasts. So just for snicks I checked out this site and between its Alexa.com and Compete.com data, my site was getting more traffic.

I then placed a call to them to have my email address removed as I had never subscribed to their site. (There was no unsubscribe in the email. Second mail in the coffin.) This company had harvested my email address and had me already quite suspicious of their ethics and beliefs Of course, there was not a real person available no matter what extension I hit so I did not leave an email.

About 30 minutes later a man called, identified himself and then I made the request about removing my email address from their database.  We had a brief talk and then he asked me what I do? Before I answered his question, I asked him since he had already sent me an email, didn’t he already  know what I did?  His response was no and that did not matter because they received all their business from emails.

Then when he learned that I had some basic Internet marketing knowledge, he hung up on me.  Never once during the conversation was I rude or impolite. Actually my curiosity had the best of me because I truly wanted to learn how a company sold using only poorly targeted emails.

I realized the reason this company does all their business via email is because they are totally clueless as to how to really sell and there were a lot of fools rushing in. Besides having claims that were beyond validation, this individual was all about sales or product based marketing.

Email blasts when combined with some other marketing activities can be affective. However top sales performers do not rely only on email blasts.  They invest the time to do their research so that they are not viewed as fools rushing in.

The lesson learned to this posting beyond allowing me the opportunity to vent just a little is if you truly wish to increase sales, take the time to know what your potential customers do. Even if you purchased a list, research the company before you make that first contact because the last thing you want is having someone about what a fool you made of yourself.