Things No Salesperson Should Ever Do

No salesperson should ever lie to win a deal, speak poorly about your competitor, exaggerate claims about what you sell, give up too soon, lack the resourcefulness to be creative in achieving your goals, be undisciplined, be pessimistic, be negative, be cynical, allow disempowering thoughts to guide your actions (or lack thereof), fail to follow up, respond to an RFP without reading and challenging it, believe they don’t need to plan a sales call, show up to a meeting without a pen and paper, rely on their company’s history to prove they’re worth doing business with, stop reading books on their craft, stop reading books that make them more conversational, fail to continuously improve their ability to create value for their clients, waste time listening to politics or sports between sales calls, leave the office without a list of phone numbers you can dial from the road, not carry something to shine their shoes in the car, pretend they can’t use the technologies necessary in sales now, believe that their business is so different that the principles of selling don’t apply to them, lead with pricing (when that is not your business model), negotiate with their sales manager before negotiating with the client, ask for the commitment to decide before going through a process that earns you the right to ask, leave a meeting without another meeting, treat the gatekeeper and other stakeholders as if they are unimportant, watch hours of television (or Netflix) at night, avoid a necessary conflict, fail to prospect every day, fail to build a pipeline that protects you from needing bad business, take on a nightmare client for the money, share your compensation model with your client, lack credibility, accept their lack of business acumen, avoid dealing with all the stakeholders who are going to be impacted by a deal, go without executive sponsorship, send a proposal by email, give the client a demo that shows them every feature, read the client your proposal out loud, or use a high pressure sales tactic to bully a prospect.