Counting back, I’ve been doing BD/Sales work for 8 years since I started my first business right after graduation. After my startup came to an end, I went on to lead BD/Sales teams at various startups. As my seniority grew and teams expanded, I began mentoring quite a few young sales professionals, and my role shifted from being the one talking business to the one watching others do it from behind the scenes. (Note: Business Development, or BD; Sales. Whether you work in BD or Sales, since you are a company’s frontline person facing external clients, I’ll refer to both roles simply as “sales” throughout this article.)
Perhaps it was only when I was no longer the main speaker in the meeting room that I had the time to sit back and observe these young sales professionals, noticing the mistakes they might inadvertently make during client interactions. The reason I wanted to write this piece is simply to point out five mistakes I used to make frequently in sales communications, so that younger sales professionals can check whether they’ve been falling into these same traps.
Page has served as Co-founder of Addweup, Head of B2B Sales at igloo, Senior Strategy Manager at Next Bank, and currently serves as Chief Business Officer at Carmatic (Chemagie).
Thinking that the key to sales is “talking.”
In interviews, 95% of the young sales candidates who come in are people who can talk effortlessly and eloquently. That’s not surprising — after all, if you can’t even articulate your thoughts clearly, how could you possibly land a role that involves “negotiating” business on behalf of a company? But being able to “talk” is just a basic skill for sales. The key that helps a junior salesperson evolve into a senior one is learning to “listen” and “observe” when the client speaks.
We’ve all heard the mystical advice from various business seminars: “You need to create demand in order to get the client to buy.” The truth is, for a salesperson, demand can’t be conjured out of thin air — it has to be uncovered by you through your conversations with the client.
In the sales workflow, cold outreach is the hardest part. “What the client is interested in is never your company, your product, or your self-introduction — it’s what problem your service or product can solve for them.” A competent salesperson can always use a few short sentences to tell the prospect “what problem you can help them solve” as a “door opener” to land that first meeting.
Everyone is busy. Clients have no reason to carve out time for a salesperson they have “no interest” in. If a client agrees to see you, it means that at least one thing in your “door opener” caught their interest, and your job in the meeting is to dig out what that thing is. The biggest mistake most junior salespeople make is launching into their pitch the moment the meeting starts, without understanding why the client was “interested” enough to take the meeting.
At the start of a meeting, I always briefly expand on the “door opener” that got me the meeting, then pause at the right moment. The client will then start asking questions about what they want to learn more about. At that point, what you should do is carefully observe and listen to the “questions” the client raises — that’s where their “interest” in your product or service lies. Even if the deal doesn’t close on the spot, you’ll at least know what the other party cares about, which helps you determine when to reach out to this client again in the future.
For a salesperson, “demand” can’t be created out of thin air — you have to dig it out by asking the right questions.
This was my foolish self back in the day — presenting a pitch without even watching the client’s reactions,
following my own pace during presentations.
“The question you just asked — we’ll get to that later.” This is my least favorite phrase in sales.
Try to imagine watching a complex movie for the first time. When you encounter a complicated plot point, you immediately get distracted thinking about it, which inevitably causes you to miss the next few minutes of the story. It’s the same when a client is listening to your presentation. When they spot something they don’t understand, and you ask them to “hold on, I’ll get to that later,” the client will end up in one of two states: First, their thinking freezes as they wait for you to eventually get to that part and resolve their confusion. Second, they give up trying to follow your logic, hoping it’ll make sense when you eventually get there. As a salesperson, are either of these the outcomes you want?
“When a salesperson is invited by a client to present, the purpose is to address the client’s questions.” Your presentation is just bait to get the client to raise questions. Since they’ve already brought up their concerns, we shouldn’t insist on finishing the presentation as planned. Many young salespeople value their own “speaking rhythm” and hate being interrupted by client questions. But afterward, you’ll discover that the clients who asked the most questions during your presentation are usually the ones most interested in your service — that’s why they have so many questions.
Furthermore, not every client will proactively raise their hand to ask questions. So you need to treat them like babies — after every sentence you say, carefully observe their expressions and reactions. Judge when you should pause to let them think, when to stop and let them ask questions, and match their processing speed as you continue guiding them to ask more. When I was a young salesperson, the biggest mistake I made was trying to rush through the presentation so the client could ask questions at the end. But the reality is, when you speed up and the other person hits something they can’t figure out, they’ll just put you on “mute” and wait for you to stop talking.
So, when a client asks a question about something you just covered, you can’t blame the client — you can only blame yourself for stubbornly sticking to your own pace.
I remember the meeting where I spoke the fastest but got rejected the hardest — it was unprecedentedly brutal.
Giving the client an overly comprehensive proposal.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying salespeople should present sloppy proposals to clients. What I mean is that you need to make the client feel they “have room to choose.”
Think of every deal as a jigsaw puzzle. If you only offer one convex piece, the client can only connect with you using a concave side. Delivering an extremely thorough, meticulously detailed proposal to the client sends the message: “Either you accept 100% of this, or forget it.” Unless your understanding and control of the client has reached 100%, this is the main reason most salespeople get rejected.
“People can’t truly be persuaded — the prerequisite for them being persuaded is that they’ve already developed the same idea themselves.” No client in the world will agree to a salesperson’s demands on a foundation they don’t believe in. As a salesperson, your job is to guide the client into “forming” a thought that aligns with your desired outcome, not to force them to accept your proposal. There may be more room for adjustment in BD work, but in Sales, where adjustments are harder, you can at least let the other party participate in the “choosing” process.
In every proposal, you should always include at least two options for the other party to choose from. The human brain is simple — when given options A and B, people tend to focus on which one is better, often overlooking the option of “actually, I could just say no.” If your product, service, or plan inherently doesn’t offer much choice, you can also try creating a “decoy option B.” Since B is just bait, its terms and content should be clearly inferior to the A option you actually want them to pick, leading the other party to think, “I’ll just go with A then.”
This is exactly what we need — making the client feel they “have a choice” and that their choice is what completes the proposal.
The essence of the ancient Chinese story “Three in the Morning, Four in the Evening” (Chao San Mu Si) is about getting the monkeys to accept the reality of only eating seven bananas a day.
Thinking that longer meetings and more follow-up items mean smoother deals.
I have never maintained full concentration in a meeting that lasted more than 60 minutes, and it’s impossible to remember 100% of what everyone said.
The “reason” clients want to see us is mostly to gather more information. They only want content that “helps them make a decision.” 20% of this comes from your talking and your slides, while 80% comes from your answers to their questions. Otherwise, they could just read the slides and email you questions — why would they bother calling you in?
A successful meeting means maximizing the time the other party spends asking questions and minimizing the length of your own talking and responses. The value of a meeting for sales is gaining the client’s “needs”; the value for the client is getting the salesperson’s “answers.” If you can stick to this principle, I guarantee the meeting usually won’t exceed 30 minutes, or an hour at most. In my 8 years of experience, I’ve never encountered a client who had the energy to keep asking questions for more than an hour. So if your meeting runs past 60 minutes, it means you, as the salesperson, have too much filler.
The other thing is follow-up items after a meeting — you should keep them to three or fewer each time, and the simpler the better. Imagine you’re at a store and a salesperson has just gotten you slightly interested in buying an air fryer. Then they ask you to go home first and check your home’s voltage, your kitchen space, whether you have a sponge brush, and whether your credit card limit is sufficient, before coming back to buy. Just thinking about it is exhausting — why would you want to agree to that proposal?
A hole-in-one meeting is a matter of luck. A smart salesperson simplifies what the client needs to verify back home and knows how to control the “scope” of each meeting to prevent follow-up items from spiraling out of control.
Meetings that go on too long really can put participants to sleep (illustrative image, not the author).
Presenting the slides in sequential order to the client.
Although I launched an online course last year on presentation persuasion techniques, more than 50% of the deals I’ve closed were done without ever opening a slide deck. That’s because when the slides sent before the meeting are simple and easy to understand, the client already knows what the meeting is about.
“Sending slides in advance is the salesperson’s duty; reading them beforehand is the client’s virtue.” We can’t ensure the client will 100% read our slides, so you should always set up follow-ups after sending the proposal and bring your slides to the meeting in case the client was too lazy to review them beforehand.
Many young salespeople have the habit of diving straight into their slides the moment a meeting starts. This is actually a terrible habit, because for clients who did read the slides in advance, you’re wasting their time. You could try putting an all-black background on the first slide. If during opening small talk you discover the other party isn’t familiar with the discussion topic, you can smoothly advance to the next slide and start sharing — this avoids putting them in an awkward position while also not wasting anyone’s time.
If you genuinely need to use slides, it’s because verbal descriptions alone don’t provide visuals, so use the slides as a visual “supplementary” tool. For example, showing what the collaboration deliverables would look like, or how many steps a complex process involves. This “supplement” should help make your presentation flow more smoothly, not burden your narrative.
If you frequently need to look at the next slide to figure out what to say next, you need to re-examine your slide order. A truly good presentation should serve as your tool, not turn you into its narrator.
The opening slide I used to rely on turned out to be the least valuable page.
Assuming interested clients will take the next step on their own.
“After the last meeting, the client hasn’t taken any follow-up action — guess they’re probably not interested in working together…” Every time I hear a young sales colleague report this, I mentally roll my eyes. If your product is so amazing that “interested clients will proactively take the next step on their own,” the first person the company should fire is you.
After every meeting with a client, the standard process is to provide materials and do your homework.
After meeting with a client, the salesperson should send out post-meeting materials as “quickly” as possible. Based on my own experience, if you send them the same day the meeting ends, 100% of clients will continue replying to you. After more than one day, the probability of them replying drops by 30% each day. If you’re worried you can’t send post-meeting materials quickly enough, you should consider finding a sales partner or keeping pre-written drafts in your email folder at all times.
Don’t be naive — not every client will dutifully do their homework. The bigger the company you’re working with, the more effort you need to invest, because before reaching the “key decision maker” who can make the final call, the better your homework is done, the more “likely” your proposal will actually make it in front of that decision maker. So when preparing post-meeting materials, consider how to make it easiest for your point of contact to pass them up the chain. If the deal is important enough, I’m happy to do the homework for my contact — the more I do, the less they have to do, and my proposal gets to be presented more faithfully to the key decision maker.
“Sending slides before the meeting helps your contact find the right people to attend; providing materials after the meeting helps your contact write the content you want them to present upward.” For large deals, the real competitive advantage lies in post-meeting homework. As a salesperson trying to close a deal, never leave your success or failure in the hands of someone else’s homework.
For every client we developed, we used to map out the company’s organizational chart to know how many levels our contact had to go through to reach the top.
As a salesperson, no client “should be” easy to work with, and no product “should be” easy to sell.
If you’ve been reading this far, you’ve probably had some exposure to sales work in your career. For those of you currently in sales, have you ever worried that your expertise might be replaced someday?
I’ve served as a product lead, and I believe that when a product is good enough, clients will come to you on their own. But standing here now as a sales team leader, the value of sales lies in spreading the benefits of the product to more clients and collecting more feedback to help product planners build better products. So as a salesperson, complaining that the product isn’t good enough to sell is a major trap. Because the better the product gets, the less relevant the sales role becomes.
With the advancement of modern technology, more and more tools can help teams improve their products and services. I clearly understand that if I can’t push a product when it’s still imperfect, I’ll quickly become one of the first to be swept away by the tides of change. Precisely because sales is hard, the value of being a salesperson remains high, and that’s how we continue to secure our place in the professional world.
In order to help our partners move the deal forward, we personally stepped in to do reports and evaluations for the client. If you’ve been in sales for a while but feel like you’re not making noticeable progress, you’ve probably already put in plenty of effort. I hope this article helps you check whether you’ve been falling into any of these traps. After all, you’ve already put in so much work — trying a little more won’t cost you anything.
If you’re interested in learning more about the theories and ideas discussed in this article, feel free to click the link below to preview the first chapter of my online course for free: Chapter 1 of “The Five-Stage Proposal Persuasion Technique”. You can also keep following this blog, where I’ll be uploading new articles and perspectives from time to time. I hope they’ll be helpful to those of you working in sales.
May every BD/Sales professional always understand their own value.