What You Should Worry About in Sales

We sometimes worry about things that are not nearly as important as what should command our attention.

Automation

You should worry less about automating client acquisition and more about acquiring clients. There is too much focus on automation because it is possible, not because it improves effectiveness. Too much focus on efficiency comes at the expense of effectiveness. You don’t acquire clients because you are efficient, you win their business because you are effective.

Efficient Communication

Worry less about efficient forms of communications and more about the quality and effectiveness the communication. Email is more efficient than many other forms of communication, allowing you to message your prospect or client on your timeline, and permitting your prospect to respond when they get around to to reading their email (if they ever bother to read your email at all). If the outcome of your email is to gain a commitment from the person receiving the email, then efficiency should not have been a consideration; effectiveness is what should have dominated the choice of the medium.

Tools and Technologies

Worry less about the tools and more about the outcomes you need. Technology can certainly help enable better outcomes, but not when there is too much focus on the tools at the expense of the desired outcomes. It makes sense to put the tools in the hands of salespeople who can create value for their prospects and clients, leveraging their business acumen to have meaningful conversations around change. What doesn’t work is believing the salesperson’s results will improve because you outfitted them with technology.

What Others Are Doing

Spend less time and energy worrying about what people post on Linkedin and worry more about what you need to do to produce the result you need now. What works for one salesperson in one company in one vertical may or may not be useful to you. The advice many of us give is contextual, and we drop a lot of that context because it makes for bad reading. The fact that someone shares something they believe is true doesn’t make it true for you, and what is true is almost certainly a partial truth. Worry about what you believe you need to do now and get started doing it.

Qualified Leads

You may be tempted to worry about leads, but you would be better served by being worried about targets. A dependence on leads is detrimental to sales success. Targeting your dream clients is the path to self-reliance. Leads are passive. Targets are proactive. Relying on others to help you create new opportunities is detrimental to your results—and your success in sales.

Your Competition

Spending time and energy worrying about what your competitor is doing isn’t as valuable as worrying about what you are doing. You can very politely and professionally ask your competitor to stop selling on price and lying about how much better their results will be when compared to what you do. Not one of your competitors will change their approach, no matter how nicely you ask. If you want to beat them, you need to worry about creating greater value than they do, and you need to worry about your effectiveness as a salesperson, variable that are within your control.

If you want to worry about something, worry about how you improve your effectiveness. Everything else is secondary to that, if it’s even worth worrying about at all.