25 Common Sales Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

In sales, even small mistakes can have significant consequences. A misstep at any stage of the sales process can harm trust, damage reputations, and reduce the likelihood of closing a deal. Fortunately, by adopting strategic best practices and using supportive technology, salespeople can minimize common errors and navigate challenges with greater confidence and success, ultimately helping them close more deals.

What Is the Sales Process?

The sales process is a set of repeatable steps that a salesperson follows with the goal of making a sale. While the number and nature of the steps may differ from company to company, the sales process typically includes these seven stages: prospecting, preparing, approaching, presenting, handling objections, closing, and following up.

Key Takeaways

• Many common sales mistakes result from a failure to establish and maintain positive relationships.
• Understanding a prospect’s needs and requirements—and how these factors change over time—is critical to avoiding sales mistakes.
• Lead qualification is one of the earliest and most important steps in a salesperson’s path toward converting a prospect to a customer.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) and configure, price, quote (CPQ) software provide the kind of real-time data and visibility salespeople need to be competitive.

The Most Common Sales Mistakes

This article examines 25 common sales mistakes, each of which has repercussions that could reverberate across a company. The errors tend to fall into broad categories—for example, lack of preparation and research, poor understanding of the product being sold, ineffective communication and relationship-building, unsuccessful lead qualification, and poor execution of the sales process itself. The good news is that all these missteps can be avoided with the right combination of skills, mentorship, best practices, and data-driven technology.

1. Putting Too Much Emphasis on Price Over Value

Selling a product based on its low price is relatively easy; selling—and pricing—a product based on its high value to the customer is much harder. That’s why many salespeople default to price-based sales tactics that ultimately undermine a product’s position and perception in the marketplace. To effectively sell a product based on value, sales professionals should work closely with customers over time to understand their resources, needs, and goals. They should also provide customers with specific, relevant metrics, case studies, and predictive modeling to help them understand the benefits the product has already delivered and can deliver in the future. Finally, salespeople should think creatively about ways a particular product could be bundled with other products and/or services to optimize its return on investment.

2. Talking Too Much Instead of Listening

Many salespeople equate selling with talking. But an unbalanced talk-to-listen ratio communicates the wrong idea—namely, that the salesperson doesn’t care about the prospect’s perspective on their history, challenges, and goals. And even if a salesperson’s talk is based on extensive customer research, too much talk and not enough listening compromises their ability to develop a strong customer relationship. Recommendations for an ideal talk-to-listen ratio vary, but most suggest listening more than talking to foster empathy and create connections that will eventually lead to a viable solution for the customer and a sale for the company.

3. Failing to Qualify Leads

Lead qualification helps salespeople focus on the prospects who are most likely to become customers. Lead scoring systems and sales metrics enable organizations to qualify leads based on buyer behavior, frequency of interactions, demographics, and company information. CRM tools can help by centralizing lead data and providing customer insights that allow sales teams to prioritize high-potential prospects. When integrated with CRM systems, CPQ software helps qualify leads by automating the process of identifying customer needs, preferences, and budget constraints through guided selling, accurate product configurations, and real-time pricing. This helps ensure that only well-matched prospects move forward in the sales pipeline.

4. Getting Into Arguments with Prospective Customers

Let’s face it: Sales interactions can be stressful. The salesperson wants to make the sale, and the prospect wants to make sure they get the best deal. Both sides may be knowledgeable about the product or service being offered, which can lead to standoffs; or one side may be less informed than the other, which can lead to defensiveness and fear. Sales professionals must always take the high ground, acting empathetically, respectfully, and thoughtfully to understand and address objections. Salespeople must also be equipped to recognize the point at which an interaction has ceased to be productive and know when to defer to a manager with the authority to either assuage the prospect’s concerns or determine that the prospect isn’t worth the trouble.

5. Failing to Prepare for Objections

Going into a sales call without preparing for potential objections is like going on a camping trip without checking the weather: You might be OK, but you’re just as likely to get caught in a figurative or literal storm. Thankfully, sales professionals have access to tools that help predict common sales objections, such as BANT (budget, authority, need, and timing), as well as more specific objections related to a customer’s industry, size, past interactions, competition, and user-base demographics. In addition, CRM systems, call recording and analysis tools, and salesforce automation software are useful tools for flagging potential objections and providing suggestions for ways to overcome them.

6. Speaking to the Wrong Stakeholders

Successful selling requires speaking to the people involved in making the decision to buy the product or service you’re selling. Careful lead qualification, research into the lead’s company and its employees, and keen relationship development can help salespeople identify the stakeholders—and influencers—involved in evaluating, testing, and buying a product. These efforts become increasingly important as the number of stakeholders involved in making buying decisions increases.

7. Using Inaccessible Language

Salespeople can easily fall into the trap of using inaccessible language, such as overly technical explanations or industry-specific jargon that potential customers may not understand. This can create confusion and make the product or service seem irrelevant or overly complicated, potentially costing a sale. Sales professionals should simplify their language, tailor their message to the prospect’s level of knowledge, and ask clarifying questions to facilitate mutual understanding. Using analogies and examples can help make the conversation more relatable and engaging, ultimately fostering a stronger connection between buyer and seller.

8. Not Asking Enough Questions (Or Not Asking the Right Ones)

When salespeople don’t ask enough questions, their presentation can come across as a canned pitch, which may leave potential customers disinterested—or worse, unimpressed. A salesperson’s ability to ask questions indicates their desire to get to know potential customers—and their businesses—better and instills confidence that they’ll be able to provide solutions that will effectively meet their customers’ needs. Of course, all this depends on salespeople asking the right questions—ones that are carefully crafted, specific to a prospect, respectful, and authentic. For example, it shows a lot more care and consideration to ask “What concerns does your development team have about AI integration in the DevOps process?” than to ask “What keeps you up at night?”

9. Overemphasizing Features Over Benefits

The old saying “show, don’t tell” is especially applicable to sales. The fact that a product has amazing features is great, but reeling off a laundry list of those features to potential customers is a waste of your time—and theirs. Demonstrating the benefits of stellar features, using evidence from existing customer reviews, demos, and product trials, is central to getting prospects interested and eventually making a sale.

10. Not Asking the Prospect About Their Needs and Requirements

Failing to ask a prospect about their specific needs and requirements can result in a generic or misaligned sales pitch that doesn’t address the prospect’s pain points or priorities. This can result in missed opportunities because it makes prospects feel unheard and undervalued and prevents salespeople from demonstrating how their product or service solves prospects’ unique challenges. Salespeople should prioritize active listening and ask open-ended, exploratory questions early in the conversation to uncover a prospective customer’s goals, problems, and decision-making criteria. By tailoring their pitches to align with their prospects’ expressed needs, sales teams can build trust, establish relevance, and significantly increase their chances of closing deals.

11. Underutilizing Your Support Teams

Failing to leverage the diverse expertise and resources available to them, such as sales support specialists, customer service representatives, sales operations managers, and marketing professionals, can significantly hinder a sales team’s effectiveness. Today, salespeople also often receive support from data scientists and artificial intelligence (AI) experts, as well as developers building apps to improve both the sales and customer experience. In fact, 19% of B2B sales forces are already implementing GenAI use cases and finding success, and an additional 23% are in the process of experimenting with it, according to McKinsey & Co.’s 2024 B2B Pulse Survey. Not taking full advantage of these resources can cause salespeople to struggle to address complex customer needs or miss crucial market trends and competitive insights. To avoid these pitfalls, sales professionals should proactively engage with their support teams through regular check-ins and collaborative tools and then incorporate their advice and insights into sales strategies.

12. Being Pushy After a Prospect Says No

After you’ve put in considerable time and effort with a potential customer, it’s more than disappointing when they say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” There may be times when an additional conversation, proof point, or discount will move the sale over the goal line, but a hard no should be respected. Continuing to push after prospects say no can damage relationships and a company’s reputation, reducing the chances that prospects will buy from your company in the future. Instead, use the opportunity as a relationship-building and learning experience. Thank prospects for their time, wish them well, and tell them you hope that you can work together in the future. If they’re open to sharing, ask why they decided not to go with your product and what could have changed their minds. Feeding this information into your sales and CRM systems will help inform future efforts.

13. Making Unrealistic Promises

Making unrealistic promises during the sales process is never a good idea, yet it happens all too often. Maybe the salesperson felt pressured, didn’t fully understand the limits of the product or service, or mistakenly thought they could offer a particular discount based on outdated information. Or perhaps a customer had unrealistic expectations and the salesperson was responding in kind. Whatever the reason, making an improbable promise will almost surely backfire. At best, it will result in disappointment; at worst, it will result in legal action. To avoid these scenarios, salespeople must develop a deep understanding of the products they sell, including their limitations. They should also arm themselves with real-time data and complete visibility into price ranges, discount thresholds, and approvals.

14. Being Overly Agreeable With the Prospect

It’s nice to be nice, but being overly agreeable can cost your company money and your customer the right solution—if you don’t lose the customer altogether. After all, being too agreeable may mean ignoring historical data and analytics or conceding too much too soon. Potential customers may appreciate an agreeable salesperson at first, but it likely won’t be long before they start to wonder whether the salesperson is genuine, which can erode trust and confidence. On top of that, a salesperson who’s focused on avoiding conflict might not ask the hard questions required to identify customers’ needs and pain points, resulting in a suboptimal solution proposal.

15. Not Intending to Close a Sale

Why wouldn’t a salesperson intend to close a sale? This type of counterintuitive action could be driven by a variety of factors, including misaligned expectations, the realization that a prospect hasn’t been properly qualified, or even a salesperson’s lack of confidence. Sometimes, a salesperson begins the sales process knowing that it likely won’t end in a sale but figuring that the information gained along the way could be helpful in the future. The problem with any of these scenarios is that they’re a waste of time and breach of trust. With proper up-front research, data analysis, and lead qualification, sales efforts can—and should—be focused on making an eventual sale.

16. Failing to Follow Up

The reasons why salespeople fail to follow up vary—ranging from fear of annoying a prospect to losing track of whom to follow up with and when—but the result is often the same: Prospects lose interest and/or start to doubt that your company cares about their business. A scheduling system can help. This could be as simple as an online calendar that generates reminders or as sophisticated as a CRM solution that automates the scheduling process based on historical, forecasting, and value-added data.

17. Ignoring Body Language and Context Cues

While CRM and CPQ tools empower sales teams with critical real-time data, visibility, and automated workflows, they can’t interpret a customer’s body language or pick up on often subtle context cues. A prospect’s crossed arms, for example, may indicate suspicion or doubt, while someone who physically leans into a discussion may be demonstrating their engagement and interest. Context cues, such as tone of voice, a prospect’s role in the organization, and company culture, are also telling. Ignoring body language and context cues can prolong or even derail the sales process. Learning to identify and tune in to them—and integrating this soft knowledge with hard data—can help smooth the path to conversion.

18. Letting the Prospect Control the Conversation

Active listening is key to effective selling, but salespeople must be careful not to let prospects control the conversation. If this occurs, they may lose the opportunity to ask pertinent questions and explain how their products can help meet a customer’s requirements and relieve pain points. Salespeople must strike a balance between making the prospect feel heard and making sure there’s sufficient time to explain product benefits in the context of what the prospect is talking about.

19. Bad-Mouthing Competitors

A big part of a salesperson’s job is explaining how their company’s product stands out from its competition. However, they must do this without bashing competitors. For one thing, bad-mouthing comes across as unprofessional. For another, you never know if your company and a competitor may one day partner or merge. Acknowledge your main competitors and your respective market positions. Be honest, transparent, and respectful about how your product’s features and support stack up against other products in the same space. Balanced and truthful analysis—rather than mudslinging—will help earn prospects’ respect and build strong and fruitful relationships.

20. Failing to Research Your Prospect

Potential customers can quickly suss out whether you know anything about them, and, if you don’t, they’ll likely assume you care nothing about them beyond a fast sale. That’s no way to start a relationship, especially when there are so many tools available to avoid such a situation. For example, CRM systems position salespeople to enter a meeting with a purposeful, relevant, and insightful pitch. And, perhaps more important, these tools help ensure that you focus on prospects that want, need, and can afford your product by centralizing data, automating lead scoring, and providing insights into customer behavior to support targeted and relevant sales efforts.

21. Over-Relying on Sales Scripts

Scripts can provide consistency for salespeople, especially those who are less experienced in the field or lack knowledge about a particular product. However, a salesperson’s overreliance on scripts can come across as incompetence or even untrustworthiness. Sales scripts can also compromise flexibility and personalization, not to mention a salesperson’s ability to improve their skills by developing solutions and responses based on purposeful customer interactions. Sales scripts have their place in low-stakes situations, but sales leaders should focus instead on building their sales team’s product and customer knowledge through mentoring, partnerships, and sales and CRM tools.

22. Trying to Close Too Quickly

Selling, especially in the B2B realm, is a long game. Salespeople who rush to close can make prospects nervous, eroding trust and decreasing the chances that all their pain points and concerns will be identified, much less addressed. To avoid rushing the sale, sales professionals should focus on building strong relationships with prospects, taking the time to thoroughly understand their needs, address all their concerns, and demonstrate value at each stage of the sales process.

23. Failing to Identify Whether the Prospect Is a Good Fit

Identifying whether a prospect is a good fit—otherwise known as lead qualification—is one of the most crucial elements of the sales process. A qualified sales lead is one who’s familiar with your product, needs your product, and can afford your product. Trying to sell to anyone who doesn’t meet these criteria is apt to be a waste of both the salesperson’s and the prospect’s time, and it could even provoke ill will on the part of a prospective company that might become a qualified lead in the future. Prospects can be qualified through research, questionnaires, and CRM technology that follows and analyzes their behavior along the marketing and sales funnel.

24. Not Knowing When to Abandon a Sale

Despite a salesperson’s best efforts, some sales just don’t—or shouldn’t—happen. It may be that a prospect has wildly unrealistic expectations or is focused only on price. Or a company may have ethical objections to how a potential customer does business or to its partners or politics. And sometimes, after working with a prospect and getting to know their business, it becomes evident that the product being considered won’t meet the prospect’s needs after all. Even with red flags like these, it can be hard to give up an opportunity. But not knowing when to abandon a sale can result in wasted time, frustration, or even a damaged reputation. To avoid these situations in the first place, companies must make sure their salespeople have the most up-to-date product and lead-qualification information.

25. Underutilizing Your Sales Technology

Many powerful technologies drive and support today’s sales process. CRM systems help companies efficiently manage customer data and interactions, CPQ software helps streamline the sales process and empowers sales staff to focus on the more nuanced elements of selling, and AI is increasingly being used in the form of chatbots and other tools to guide and encourage prospects through the sales funnel. In fact, data-driven commercial teams that blend personalized customer experiences with GenAI are 1.7 times more likely to increase market share than those that don’t, according to a McKinsey survey. But while some salespeople embrace technology with open arms, others feel overwhelmed because they aren’t sure how to use it or they’re averse to change. To overcome these obstacles, businesses must make technology as easy to use and accessible as possible. Providing ongoing training, as well as quantitative metrics for how the use of sales technology increases conversion success, can help. That being said, companies must also be firm in setting expectations for use: In other words, underutilizing sales technology can’t be an option.

Software That Streamlines the Sales Process

To select the most appropriate sales automation software, business leaders must consider both functionality and their specific requirements. With NetSuite CPQ software, companies can seamlessly integrate their sales processes with their existing NetSuite CRM and enterprise resource planning systems, reducing setup complexity and implementation time. NetSuite’s software includes built-in guided selling tools, automated workflows, and customizable templates that allow businesses to quickly configure the system to their requirements while maintaining flexibility to accommodate growth.

Advanced features, such as dynamic pricing, automated approval routing, and real-time visibility into the quote-to-cash process, help companies maximize their CPQ investment from day one. NetSuite’s comprehensive solution empowers staff to focus on optimizing their sales processes and growing their customer base, rather than spending time and resources managing complex pricing guides and manual processes.

Sales is a complicated and pressure-packed profession, with lots of room for error. Some of the mistakes salespeople make, such as bad-mouthing competitors, are fairly easy to correct—just don’t do it. Others, such as failing to qualify leads or prepare for objections, require more effort, and often technology, to rectify. With a willingness to identify and accept mistakes and embrace mentorship, partnership, best practices, and technology, salespeople can learn from their mistakes and ultimately rise above them.

Sales Mistakes FAQs

What are the biggest obstacles in sales?

The biggest obstacles in sales involve generating quality leads, developing effective sales skills, and building trust and relationships with prospects.

What is the most common objection in sales?

The most common objection in sales typically revolves around price—either a product is viewed as too expensive or a prospect doesn’t have the budget for a product.

Why do sales fail?

Sales fail for a variety of reasons, but one of the most common is a failure to understand a customer’s needs and requirements. Other culprits include poorly qualified leads, unclear communication, lack of follow-up, and a focus on features rather than benefits.

What is the most difficult task in the sales process?

Sales prospecting is widely considered the most difficult task in the sales process.