Sales people fail all the time. Depending on how you look at it, or who you ask, they fail more often than not.

Sales people fail for two reasons, they fail themselves or the company fails them. Today’s post will address why sales people fail themselves. I’ll drop my 2 cents on how companies fail sales people in a follow up post.

Sales people fail, because they simply fail themselves. When sales people fail themselves they’ve done some or all of these things;

1. They don’t make enough calls
2. They don’t learn the product
3. They don’t know the product well ENOUGH
4. They lack business acumen
5. They’re selling features and benefits, not solving problems
6. They’re not listening
7. They don’t understand the value proposition
8. They can’t create a unique client specific value proposition
9. They complain about the product
10. They complain about the lack of leads
11. They’re building their pipeline
12. They’re wasting time on deals that won’t close
13. They’re not using social media
14. They aren’t reading sales blogs (like this one) 🙂
15. The don’t have a plan
16. They aren’t using the CRM properly (or god forbid, not using it all)
17. They don’t have a smartphone
18. Their deal strategies suck
19. They don’t know the buyers journey
20. The don’t read a book a month
21. They blame
22. They don’t have a personal development plan
23. The just can’t sell
24. They can’t identify the true client problem(s)
25. They’re afraid of the client
26. They aren’t teaching
27. They’re too busy building “relationships”
28. They talk too much about themselves and their product
29. They don’t work hard enough
30. They quit too soon

These are just a handful of the reasons sales people don’t make their number. When we miss our number, we can only blame ourselves. There is a slew of reasons and most of them start with us. If you want to make your number. If you want to be the number one rep, do less of this stuff and more of the good stuff.

Sales rocks because success is so uniquely tied to individual effort, effort in, results out. It’s that easy.

Are you making your number?