Resting On Your Laurels

What have you done for me lately? That seems to be the sales battle cry. A sales career can be one without progress. In every other profession, you start out near the bottom and work your way up. Not so much in sales. You may gain experience and product knowledge and be assigned larger accounts…and still be competing with kids right out of college. In other careers, experience leads to promotions, prestige and more money. In sales, you’re only as important as your last month of production.

In sales, your base salary will stay pretty much the same from the start of your career until the day you retire. The only increases you’ll see will be due to inflation. And, if you get a boost, you’ll be expected to sell more.

So, let’s say you have a run of success and you end up being top salesperson for eight straight months. You start feeling pretty darn good about yourself. You got a strut to your step, managers repeatedly use you as an example to your underperforming cohorts and gradually you start forming the opinion that odor and you are mutually exclusive. If you’re a man, every woman in the office smiles at you, if you’re a woman, you make all the male reps’ privates shrink.

Then a few things transpire, in descending order:

1. You lose some of your fire.
2. You start feeling pressure to stay on top.
3. You start looking for management to rescue you with a promotion.

You’re making money and you need time to spend it. You start shopping during work hours, eating lunch at nice restaurants and leaving work early on Fridays. You take more vacations. You start relying too heavily on your sales funnel and stop prospecting. All of a sudden sales aren’t pouring in as they used to. Some other sales rep’s totals start approaching your own. Pretty soon your manager starts asking you what’s going on, what you’ve been up to and how you’re going to fix things. You start feeling disrespected. You vow to work harder but you’ve developed bad habits that are difficult to correct. Your sales figures continue to dip and you start to lose confidence. As your confidence drops, you get nervous when you prospect; you put off callbacks and hesitate to close. You start to wonder if you lost confidence because you stopped selling or if you stopped selling because you lost confidence. Next thing you know, your manager starts talking about an action plan. Action plan? You were top rep, eight months in a row! You can’t believe you’re being treated with such contempt. You start looking for a new job but no one seems interested because they sense your desperation.

What happened?

You rested on your laurels. You started to believe that sales was something it isn’t and that your sales totals from one month would mean something months later. Instead of building on your efforts, you’re going to have to start all over again, with another organization. Hopefully you’ll be able to get the hunger to sell once again.

What to do?

Stay humble and hungry. Don’t look at sales reports or listen to managers. Don’t think you have some kind of special gift or that you were born to sell. Don’t get too high or too low, stay even keeled.