Sales Professionals and Adventurers

 By Sam Kariuki

In most of my training sessions I ask participating sales people why they love sales jobs. I get all manner of answers ranging from comical to philosophical.  These responses generally fit into these four categories:

• You determine your pay (if paid on commission and make good sales)
• Independence of spending time (or wasting it) without supervision 
•  One does not sit behind the desk with loads of paper work every day (but have sufficient time to visit an old relative whenever I feel like)
• Every new day has unexpected new happenings (and therefore I never know what to expect).

I have been thinking about the last category of responses and I have found concluded that this comes usually from struggling sales people. These are the people who consider selling to be adventure. You might recall the story in junior primary school books titled ‘Adventure in the Forest’. It is a story of some kittens that decided to explore a nearby forest. In their exploration these adventurous (or disobedient if you are a strict parent)   kittens decided to explore the neighboring forest their parents had always warned them never to venture into.  Their venture soon turned into a nightmare with many near death experiences resulting from lethal snakes, Overflowing Rivers and finally getting lost on their way back home. The story is usually exciting to my kids and it is fun watching a movie with this plot. Adventures, in all their attractiveness in stories of heroism, have no place in selling. No serious professional consider his career as adventure.

True, all top performers in whichever professional line draw great pleasure from his work but, he can predict with some degree of certainty the expected results of his work. Can you imagine a surgeon who considers opening up of bodies as an adventure?  One guided by the philosophy, we will discover what will happen as we proceed with the surgery. The same can be said of sales person who never plans his sales meetings, research on his customers, prepares his presentations with expected outcomes in mind. Every sales professional should be able to tell his results on the basis of how he spends time prospecting, qualifying opportunities, making presentations, nurturing leads and every other activity that takes up their selling time. If adventure in sales never pays, how come so many sales people consider their work to be an adventurous undertaking? My conclusion is that many sales people have never considered themselves to be professionals. A Professional invests time developing the competencies necessary for excellence in his job. He spends many hours in study, research and testing of theories in real life situations. So let us all become sales professionals and sales adventurers.