What to Expect

This blog is written specifically for sales people you might best describe as restless.

Restless sales people may strike you at first as being an odd audience for a blog. Have you ever heard any significant population of sales people described as restless?

But wait. Hear me out.

Plenty of us may diagnose ourselves or some of our peers as having Attention Deficit Disorder (or ADD).

I’ve known a few sales people who may have Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS), a distracting condition that often annoys travel companions, workmates and partners in confined spaces such as shared offices, airplanes, cars and beds.

The Silent Scourge of RSPS

Inspired by the pharmaceutical industry’s brilliance in building multibillion-dollar markets to cure conditions no one previously knew to exist, I have identified a common condition that is the scourge of sales people everywhere.

I call it Restless Sales Person Syndrome (or RSPS).

The condition knows no boundaries. My studies suggest that RSPS may afflict as many as 2o percent of all sales people everywhere, regardless of social circumstances, ethnicity, geography or age.

That’s a big enough market for me.

Let me put that it terms that may make it easier for you to understand the enormity of the problem.

If RSPS were a virus with a mortality rate of 100% and could easily be transmitted to anyone through the air or through physical contact with everyday objects such as doorknobs and faucet handles, it could kill as many as 1.35 billion men, women and children on all five continents.

As one of the more extreme victims of RSPS, I have also become the world’s leading expert at diagnosing and treating the condition.

Restlessness, the medical dictionary tells us, is a physical or mental state in which a person denies or lacks rest. It can also be a state of uneasiness, of constant physical motion, or an unrestful state of mind.

Not all restlessness is the result of discontentment. But all discontentment causes restlessness.

Are You a Restless Sales Person?

You may have RSPS if you exhibit the following symptoms:

• Perfectionism
• Workaholism
• Obsession with competence and professionalism
• Commitment to lifelong learning and constant professional development
• Insatiable curiosity
• Impatience with foolishness, B.S. and buffoonery
• Relentless drive to achieve excellence
• Fundamental honesty and integrity
• Apathy
• Boredom
• Cynicism
• Tendency to laugh inappropriately as the misfortunes of others
• Frustration with your management, your peers, your customers or prospects
• Disappointment or disillusionment about the purpose and direction of your life
• Dissatisfaction with the status quo
• A tendency to move from job to job
• Frustration with the social status of your occupation
• Intolerance of office politics
• A persistent sense that the grass is greener on the other side of the hill.

If you are self-satisfied and content, you are almost certain not to have RSPS at this time, but you may want to be tested to serve as a benchmark in case you develop it when your career fails to progress in the way you expect.

If you are neither self-satisfied nor content and you exhibit more than four of the foregoing symptoms, you may have RSPS and should seek professional help.

Where should you seek help? You’ve come to the right place.

RSPS Victims Need Treatment

Most sales people need help, whether they know it or not. And sales people with RSPS need more help than those who don’t have it.

Sadly, the vast majority of sales people who need help don’t seek it, and too many who seek help don’t find the kind they need.

It’s surprising how hard it is to find truly useful assistance.

So Much Advice, Yet So Little That Really Helps

Book stores are full of titles about sales and selling. You can easily learn 103 magic phrases that are “sure to close any sale.”

You can learn “power techniques” that empower you to “control your customer’s mind.” You can learn how to network and how to dress for success.

Some of these tips may be useful, depending on the kind of selling you do and the level of your experience.

Who’s Helping You Think About Your Life in Sales?

But where do you go for counsel when you discover your product does more harm than good, and you’re not sure you ought be selling it?

Where do you turn if your CEO or sales manager expects you to be dishonest or unethical or wants you to do something illegal?

Who helps you decide whether you’re in the wrong occupation or just in the wrong job or industry?

Who helps you overcome the stereotypes and mental images that hold so many of us back from achieving everything we can?

Which sales experts speak for the value of sales fundamentals? Who teaches enduring principles?

Simplistic Formulas and Contrived Acronyms

Too many sales experts sell what they pass off as their own formula, but it’s little more than a recycled version of other peoples’ ideas presented without due credit to the source.

Then the experts summarize their repackaged version with a hokey, trademarked mnemonic device that’s so contrived that you can’t remember it.

Where Do You Go For New Thinking About the Big Issues You Face?

Who helps you cope with the big issues of selling that aren’t covered in conventional sales training — issues like call reluctance, fear of failure, discrimination, ethics, emotional ups and downs, stress and anxiety, working with the boys’ network, coping with jerks, and the like?

Who helps you adjust your mindset when it needs realignment?

Who encourages you to plod on, maybe pointing yourself in a new direction, when you feel like packing up?

Who’s takes your side and isn’t getting paid to get you back on your company’s side?

The answer is probably no one — unless you’re one of the lucky few to have a great mentor, a clergy member or therapist with an unusual understanding of business, or you’ve enlisted the services of an exceptional sales coach.

Good Help Is Available, But It Can Be Hard to Find

Of the hundreds of books you’ll find on the shelves of your local bookstore or library, a few dozen are much better than the kind I’ve described. The best of those can literally change your career and your life.

But such gems are not so easy to find, and who has time to sort through the bad ones to get to the good?

For sales managers and other business executives, the Internet provides endless advice about how to find and evaluate sales people, how to train them, how to coax peak performance out of them.

It’s almost as if they’re managing race horses. In some sense they are.

Do You Sometimes Feel Like You’re Not a Member of the Club?

When the “experts” list the traits and behaviors common to outstanding sales people, I often feel they’re talking about people I’ve never met and maybe wouldn’t like.

I usually don’t see much of myself in the “sales champions” they describe. Yet people I’ve worked with have told me I’m among the best they’ve seen.

How can that be?

Don’t Buy the Stereotypes

Think how sales people appear in pop culture. Have you seen The Tin Men, Tommy Boy, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room, The Big Kahuna, The Music Man, Bonfire of the Vanities, or Death of a Salesman?

Few people outside of sales could appreciate these portrayals more than we sales people do. We enjoy them because we recognize elements of ourselves and our world in them.

But they also distort our view of ourselves, like wavy mirrors in a carnival fun house. We’re victims of such stereotypes to the extent that we let  them constrain the way we feel about ourselves, how we work and how we live.

A Gallup poll found in 2007 that the public ranks both car sales people and lobbyists at the bottom of a list of occupations ranked for ethical standards and honesty. Car sales people came in only slightly ahead of lobbyists and slightly behind advertising practitioners and congressmen.

If we were talking about the American states, then sales people, lobbyists and congressmen would be like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia competing for dead last place in rankings of almost any desirable trait.

Room for All Kinds of Sales People

People who sell consumer products are often a different breed from those who sell capital goods to business. But in the minds of  people who don’t buy capital goods, we’re all enough alike to dislike equally.

If you live in Montana, how much do you care about the differences between Georgia and Alabama?

Seeking Rewards Beyond Money

People outside of work often ask what I do for a living. When I tell them sales, the conversation usually takes a sharp turn in a different direction. Maybe they’d find my work more interesting if I sold breast implants or estates on tropical islands.

It comes as a revelation, even to plenty of sales people, that this career can be deeply rewarding far beyond the comfortable  income it may deliver. Why don’t more of us expect better from our occupation?

Is it because we’ve bought into the stereotypes? Has our personal experience in sales made us think any success we might achieve would require us to become someone we’d rather not be? Or has our perspective been cruelly distorted by the ravages of untreated RSPS?

Most Occupations That Pay This Well Are No Cake Walk

A career in sales can be harsh at times. But sales is just one of many occupations where newcomers routinely take a lot of lumps before they reap many rewards.

Think of performers, including actors and musicians. Or professional athletes. Or doctors.

They all face daily defeat and discouragement. They all have long, hard apprenticeships. And each occupation produces only a small number of big winners.

Nor is sales the only occupation that poses daily ethical dilemmas and temptation to go astray.

What Kind of Help Do RSPS Victims Need?

To go back to my opening point, my experience as a sales manager tells that victimes of RSPS desperately  help with the “head game” of selling. We often talk about sales as a “numbers game.” The more frogs the princess kisses, the more likely she is to find her handsome prince.

But the head game of selling is just as important. Maybe it’s more so in the long run, because it affects what you think and how you feel about selling. Your thoughts and feelings infuse everything you say and do.

Align with Your Values

You need encouragement to work through your feelings about honesty, integrity, competence, self discipline and professionalism. They’re all important to your self-esteem, and self-esteem is an essential pillar of your happiness.

You need encouragement to seek personal growth through your work. Instead of an imbalanced, sugary diet of sales “secrets,” tips or tricks, you probably need more of the protein of mindsets, fundamentals and skills.

Find Your Own Path

You need encouragement to understand, respect and appreciate the special contributions your own uniqueness and individuality can bring to your career in sales.

You need permission to stop trying to fit yourself into someone else’s mold. You need to explore ways to learn your strengths and cultivate your passions rather than just trying to overcome your weaknesses.

Finally, you need support in listening to your heart and following your conscience. You need encouragement to do the right thing. Doing what’s right ensures the best long-term interests of you and your customers, if necessary, over those of your boss or your company.

In all the reading I’ve done and all the sales training I’ve taken, no one else has addressed these topics in the ways I think I can.

I commit to basic honesty in helping you achieve success in sales, however you define it.

Don’t Trust Fast and Easy

I’m not going to suggest here that I or anyone else can help you achieve any fast or easy success. Nearly all of the few fast successes I’ve seen were over as quickly and as unexpectedly as they arrived.

If you get better control over your thinking, though, I believe you can achieve a much happier and more fulfilling life and ultimately a more successful career over the long run.

Together, we will work through your RSPS. You may never cure your condition, but you can learn to manage it in ways that will help you achieve a rewarding and fulfilling life in sales.