When success spirals you downwards
In sales, customers matter.
Of course. Acquiring customers is the apex consideration for all sales professionals. The arithmetic is simple. More customers mean more sales. That equals more future upsell. And that translates to more sales.
The energy feeds on itself.
Ask any salesperson about the importance of growing their client portfolio, and 90% will talk day and night about customer acquisition. However, battle-hardened salespeople understand one truth.
The number of customers is not the issue.
The caliber of the customer is.
The ever-fatigued salesperson
Have you ever met a top salesperson walking around with a ton of bricks on their shoulders?
Haha. Well, I have.
And it is [near] impossible to imagine that such a profile exists. Joe is one.
He is one of the best sales guys in my regional team. He regularly steps into the top 2 positions every quarter. He can close low-ticket and high-ticket transactions.
Joe is one of the best the regional team has ever seen [to me].
Joe should be walking around with unshakable confidence. Yet, I have never seen him exhibiting that aura. Instead, he is frequently fatigued, beaten, and always working hard to convince our consultants to go the extra mile for him. It was strange. It was sad.
But… not quite.
Our consultants hate to be assigned to his project delivery deals. They hated it so badly that it was repeatedly captured in our inter-team open discussion forum. This sentiment caught the attention of my Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) once.
Zack, my CRO, decided to investigate. He did not inform Angel [my direct boss, the Regional Sales Director] and me [Joe reports to me, I report to Angel]. He took the consultants out for coffee, and they spilled the beans.
Some of these paraphrased soundbites include,