Over the decades that I’ve been involved in sales, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of salespeople.  Certain negative tendencies — mistakes that salespeople make — keep surfacing.  Here is number five of my top five.  See to what degree you (or your sales force) may be guilty of them.
 

Mistake Number Five: No investment in themselves.
 

Here’s an amazing observation.  No more than 5% of active, full-time professional salespeople ever invest in their own growth.  That means that only one of 20 salespeople have ever spent $20.00 of their own money on a book on sales, or subscribed to a sales magazine, taken a sales course, or attended a sales seminar of their own choosing and on their own nickel.
 

Don’t believe me?  Take a poll. Ask your salespeople or your colleagues how many of them have invested more than $20.00 in a book, magazine, course, etc. in the last 12 months.  Ask those who venture a positive answer to substantiate it by naming their investment. Don’t be surprised if the answers get vague. You’ll quickly find out how many salespeople in your organization have invested in themselves.
 

Sales are the only profession I know of where the overwhelming majority of practitioners are content with their personal status quo.
 

Why is that?  A number of reasons.
 

Some mistakenly think that their jobs are so unique that they cannot possibly learn anything from anyone else. This attitude dooms them to a lifetime of mediocrity.
 

Still, others think they know it all. They have, therefore, no interest in taking time from some seemingly valuable thing they are doing to attend a seminar or read a book.  They are destined to be obsolete in a world that is changing faster than at any time in the past.
Some don’t care.  Their focus is hanging on to their jobs, not necessarily getting better at them.
 

But I think the major reason is that the overwhelming majority of salespeople do not view themselves as professionals and, therefore, do not have professional expectations for themselves.  They worked their way up from the customer service desk or they landed in sales by chance, and they view their work as a job to be done, not a profession within which to grow.
 

Overcoming This Tendency
 

Decide to fix it.  It really is that simple.  If you rarely, if ever, actually invest in your own growth, then decide to fix it. Decide to view your job as a profession, and decide to be a professional.  That means that, of course, you‘ll invest in your own growth.
 

Once you make that decision, then it’s easy to come up with resources to do so.  Decide to go to at least one seminar a year, and start watching your mailbox for likely suspects.  Decide to read a book once a month, and visit the library or your local book store regularly.  Decide to expose yourself to new and good ideas, and regularly visit the websites and newsletters that support salespeople.
 

Once you decide to do it, the doing is easy.  It’s the decision that’s required.
 

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