3 common mistakes most sales professionals make in their career

Life of a sales professional is not easy, there are multiple challenges that one navigates in order to continue to make progress in their career.

And, among all the action and constant pressure of achieving or over-achieving the numbers, often sales professionals miss out on aspects that are important for shaping their career, some sales professionals make conscious attempt to work on those aspects, but many just go with flow and miss out.

While the list is quite long around the common mistakes, but let me share with you the top 3 common ones and what to do in order to avoid them:

1. Not spending enough time around learning and mastering the craft

There is no short cut to being great at sales, the process of becoming good means continuous learning and practising craft on a regular basis. When i ask this question to a sales professional what are you doing to master the art and science that is sales, mostly i get this blank look, hinting that they do not have any specific strategy around it, they just go with the flow and learn on the job or learn with the customer.

But don’t do that mistake, you need to have plan and strategy to become good at sales. Question is what you need to do here? Here are some of things you could do to avoid this mistake.

• Have a plan and specific schedule: Yes, you need to have a specific plan, how would you improve your game. Also, the learning activities should be there on your calendar, so that you take time out to learn and become better, it could be a scheduled hour on Saturday or Sunday, and you need to have clarity what you are doing to do in that scheduled time.
• Invest in skill development: You need to invest money and time in developing your skills, be it reading books, watching videos, investing into courses etc. The best asset to invest is you, and if you get better, then you can make more money, so continue to invest to sharpen your skills.
• Learn from people ahead than you: Having mentors, or coaches or trainers, could fast track your growth journey, as you can avoid lot of mistakes and trails and errors, to improve faster.

Sales is a very deep domain, and there are so many aspects that one needs to master in order to become really good at it. If you really want to get ahead and become a top sales professional, you need to crack this and avoid the trap of not doing anything here and leaving everything to chance.

2. Not building network actively

You network is your net worth, this line is pure gold, most sales professionals know and understand that network is very important, but how many really have a action plan on building a strong network, how many really have a solid inner circle, not many.

Most sales professionals only network with customers, or with people they meet in events, but those all are transactional in nature, there is nothing strategic about it. Many cases they are not able to leverage that network. What to do then?

• Networking actively: Focus on building network actively, as it is a continuous process, you can’t wake up one fine day thinking today you would build those connections.
• Build diverse network: You need to have a diverse set of network, you need expand your horizon beyond just one category of people. Meet people beyond your industries, ranks and domains.
• Don’t wait before its too late: Don’t try to build your network when you desperately need one, start early, start when you don’t need a network. That would improve your game significantly.

When you do above, you would start building a quality network, that you could leverage at right time, and this would give you really an unfair advantage over people who don’t do this consistently.

3. Not having mentors to guide in their journey

This is by far the most common mistake i have observed among sales professionals, when i ask them if they have mentors to guide or help, most of them answer no, they do not have mentors, and they do not even know what they are missing out.

Also, most sales professional shy away from seeking help from people ahead than them, as they feel why would they help them, they think if they seek help then they might come across as someone that is not doing well in their career. Well it is not true, it is the quite opposite, people who are doing well, they work with mentors.I have seen many sales professionals moving ahead faster, just because they have really good mentors helping them up their game.

• Find mentors actively: Like sales, finding mentors requires the same plan of action, make a list of people who you want as mentors, and then reach out to them formally and request them to become your mentor. Obviously you need to give valid reason why they should mentor you. And, if someone says no, then you know what to do, move on to the next one!
• Have more than one mentor: Don’t limit yourself to just one mentor, reach out to more mentors, have a diverse set of mentors to guide, that could help in different areas than just one.
• Have schedule of interaction: Once you have mentors, then don’t reach out to them on ad-hoc basis, have a plan in place, be it once a month or once in a quarter, whatever that frequency is, put that thing on calendar. Make sure you show up for that meeting, don’t skip, respect each others time.

By doing the above you would start gathering important people around you, that could guide you better and could help you improve your game and get to next level faster.

Hope you now have got the clarity around the 3 common mistakes that you might be making without realising it.

Now you got two options here, either you could try to fix those mistakes by yourself, or you could choose another smarter option here.

That is to join the SalesTiger club, become a member, and get everything that you need to succeed as sales professional on a platter.

If your next question is, what is SalesTiger?

Short answer, it’s an exclusive community of ambitious sales professionals that gives them unfair advantage. For more details and a long answer please visit: www.salestiger.club