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As I see many people refer to such things as:Poor CRMLow-quality leadsLack of product knowledgeInability to identify proper prospect-worthy customersAll the above is true; if you don’t have skills you won’t be able to close a sale, bad CRM can slow you down and lack of leads may stop you from hitting the quota.Yet, neither of the above problems is the biggest one.What is more, each of them can be easily resolved.You can switch to another CRM, pick up a course or two, and implement better prospecting plan.But there is one problem that hits nearly every salesperson and is very hard to harness.What is it?The answer: Stress.It might sound pretty innocent but stress is the major problem in the world of sales.“But wait?”, “how do you know that” - you may ask.Right, I wouldn’t give such an answer three months before because I didn’t know that much about the problems of salespeople but things have changed.I decided to dive deeper into problems, worries, and concerns of salespeople to exploit the dark side of the job and career in sales. Of course, the purpose of such research was not to discourage others from pursuing a career in sales. It was meant to show what it’s really like to work as a salesperson and what drawbacks such a job have.To gather the crucial data I asked salespeople themselves. All kinds of salespeople - sales reps, managers, associates, agents, consultants, VPs, directors, and more.All of them did shine a light on the topic of drawbacks of the job in sales.So… That’s the way I found out that stress is the biggest problem in sales or maybe rather a lack of a solution that would help salespeople deal with or avoid that stress is the problem.I used the answers provided to create a Social Study that would outline all of the issue linked to the job of salespeople.To show you why stress is the biggest issue of job in sales…“90% of all claim that stress is a part of being a salesperson and 88% admitted that they had to deal with the stress throughout their career.”What’s interesting or rather frightening is that 90% of all salespeople asked, admitted that stress is an integral part of being a salesperson.This shows how common it is to suffer because of the stress when you are working as a salesman.What’s more, nearly the same number of people claimed that they had to deal with the stress throughout their career (in general) but as we dive deeper into the Study “68% of that people said that they have to deal with it on a daily basis”.From nearly 90% of salespeople who claimed that stress is, in fact, their sworn friend, 68% of them said that they have to deal with it EVERYDAY!This was honestly a stunning discovery that did show how big of an issue the stress is when it comes to the job of salespeople.Summing things up, I hope you’ll find my answer helpful and hopefully it will broaden your knowledge of sales and salespeople.Before you go, just want to drop you a tip - If you would like to get to know other facts that I’ve described in the Social Study you’ll find it here[1] There, I showcase such issues as AI in sales, lack of motivation, burnout and more. Hope you’ll find it a good read!Best!Footnotes[1] Salespeople: Do we know who they really are? [Social Study] - CrazyCall

Having a job in sales can truly test a person’s strength given the nature of having to signNow out constantly and at times being rejected. Everyday, salespeople have to hit certain quotas and handle the push to always be on. It’s a test on skills and most especially, character. How you see rejection shows a huge part of who you are as a person.But then again, we’re all human who have limits and frustrations could take the better of us. When you get frustrated, it’s likely that disaster follows because it interferes with your ability to do things right. Here are some of the common instances that get reps frustrated. Knowing this would help you be aware of them and enable you to know how to handle them when they arise.Getting low-quality leadsThere are times when reps feel like they’re not getting sales-ready leads they need to hit their quota. At the end of the day, they just want their prospects whether MLQ leads or ToFu leads to be sales-ready. MLQs or marketing qualified leads are those who have expressed the desire to connect with your company either through signing up for a trial, giving you their full information on a contact form, or directly inquiring at the sales team. ToFu leads or top-of-the-funnel leads are those who are still at the research stage and could be unsure as to what their current unmet needs are. Usually, connecting with ToFu leads end up being brushed off or hung up.You already have a rough idea of what ToFus need before engaging with them. The content they opted-in for will give you an idea of what issues they’re facing. Your first conversation with them probably won’t be a selling one. Take a consultative approach and use the call to help them uncover inefficiencies and issues in their business. Make the call helpful and try not to be pushy. This will make them feel that you’re a valuable resource. In B2B sales, these types of relationships are what you want to develop with lead, especially with decision makers.“The Sales process slows down the sales cycle”It’s widely known that top salespeople are those who follow the sales process in qualifying and closing deals. Most reps get frustrated when they’re unable to close deals after following the outlined sales process. But the reality is that reps need to be humble and trust the wisdom of management. At times we tend to think that we could use our own methods because we think it would be more effective, but really, we’re letting the deal slip out of our hands when we don’t follow the established sales process. Bob Urichuck of the National Association of Sales Professionals said in Are You Following A Sales Process? that the buyer is always in control because they follow buyers’ sale process.Sales processes are designed to help salespeople uncover buyers’ interest and match their need with a solution. A quick tip: knowing if a lead is worth your time will rid you of frustration.Should a CRM be used all the time?Nowadays, sales organisations are largely tech driven but there are still some organizations that are still not CRM compliant. Some dislike using CRMs because it leaves them frustrated--typing information into the system, taking away minutes that could’ve been used on the phone.The reality is that CRM softwares paved the way for today’s sales acceleration solutions. These tools help shorten the sales cycle and reps who embrace sales acceleration are those who succeed. Reps should understand that these tools were created to take out the frustration and not to add to it. It could be difficult to use in the beginning but the results are definitely worth it.Using a CTI or computer-telephony integration like Tenfold will increase efficiency of your sales calls and removes the frustration caused by manual data entry and the problems associated with qualifying leads and contacts.

This is like magic. Thank you. Finally a question made for me. I don't even need a belt to fit this question around my waist. First, I have some credentials. I've failed at 17 businesses. I've succeeded at a few. But failed at most. I've also run a $125 million venture capital firm and I'm currently invested in about 30 companies, many of which I advise or on the board, etc. Oh, one thing before I answer the question: the companies that NEVER call me are always the ones that are doing the best. I made lots of mistakes as a first time entrepreneur. In every possible way. And I see a lot of those mistakes repeated in companies I'm invested in. I keep telling myself to remember these. Maybe this answer will be a good way for me to remember. Note: these are MISTAKES. So they are like double negatives. A) START YOUR BUSINESS WHEN YOU ARE BROKE Don't start a company if you're broke. This is not the same as "having no money". If you are fine staying on the floor of a friend's house and living on nothing then you are not quite broke. You have food and shelter. But if you have kids and a wife and a mortgage, etc (the other extreme) don't go broke and start a business. When I started my first business, I stayed at my full time job for 18 MONTHS before I left to become CEO of my startup full-time. We had 12 employees by then and almost as many clients. In other words, I knew I could replace my salary and still pay my employees for at least six months even if everything went down hill. Which leads me to.... B) IF YOU ONLY HAVE MONEY TO LAST YOU SIX MONTHS THEN YOU ARE ALREADY OUT OF BUSINESS I was on the board of a company once and when I read the monthly financials I realized the burn (the monthly loss in cash) was such that we would run out of money in six months. I called the other board members. They hadn't even looked at the financials. I called the CEO. He said, "but we have six months!" This is really really important: if you have six months, IT IS ALREADY SIX MONTHS FROM NOW. What that means is: no matter what you do: you will not be able to raise the money, do the legal, find the customers, do the work, get paid, or whatever you need to do - in six months time. You are the walking dead and you don't know it. Here's what we did. I called an emergency board meeting. We explained the situation to the CEO. He refused to believe it. I called him separately and gave him ten different examples. He finally got it. We fired a lot of people to reduce the burn. Somehow it didn't reduce enough. We hired a bank. We went to all the usual players. Everyone said no about buying us. They all were waiting for us to die. And then they would scrape us up for nothing. Finally, someone bought us for a good amount 2x what we put in a few months ago. I don't know why did it. I just thank god they did. The CEO, who didn't even realize he was going to go broke, made $6 million and moved to another country. We officially sold the company the day before the company was going to run out of money. Six months after that first phone call to the day. C) SMOKE CRACK We have a cognitive bias to think that our own ideas are great ideas. It's hard to admit that they won't work. Profits are the purifier of a business. That's the best way you can tell you have a good idea. If people give you SO MUCH money that you have money left over. Revenues are the next bests thing after profits. And users are the next best thing after that. If you are having trouble with any of the above three and this situation lasts more than a few months then you are smoking crack. You have to come up with a better idea. This doesn't apply to biotech or scientific companies that need to raise a lot of money. But it applies to every other business. D) UNDER PROMISE AND OVER DELIVER Yes, this is a MISTAKE first-time entrepreneurs make. Your competition is over-promising. Here's what you can go wrong if you under-promise and over-deliver. First off, anyone who over-promises is going to win the business. They might do a bad job but possession is 9/10 the law. They have the client and they can do things to fix the relationship. Second, you might under promise and UNDER deliver. Then you're just a bad vendor and they will eventually switch to someone else. What's the solution? One thing: Over promise....and over deliver. Now you're amazing. And the client is there forever. E) DON'T COMMUNICATE Here's the magic rule: talk to a new customer every day for 100 days. It doesn't matter what you talk about. Just call them and say, "how's it going?" Some customers might look at this and say, "I don't want to hear from my vendor for 100 days in a rule." They are lying. They do. And they don't know it. This is often called, "following up". As soon as you meet a potential customer, have an entire system in place to follow up. As soon as you deliver a proposal, follow up, as soon as you deliver a product, follow up. Even when you are in the middle of completing a project, follow up. FOLLOW UP You call and just say, "I always want to make sure I'm doing my best for you. Is all ok?" And then listen. And then say good-bye so you don't waste their time. Do that and you have a client for life. Trust me trust me trust me. F) HIRING PEOPLE Most startups don't need to hire that many people. Like, don't hire a secretary. Or a head of HR. Or even a head of sales. If you're the CEO, then you are the head of sales, the project manager, the secretary, and the head of HR. Wait, in each case, until you absolutely overwhelmed before you start hiring people. Once you hire someone there is a world of S**& that you have to deal with. Personalities, fights, politics, disagreements, gossip, etc. And, the most basic - they might do a bad job. A worse job than you would do because you are the OWNER and they are not. By the way, being overwhelmed is a good thing. It means you have revenues, profits, or users. Then you are allowed to hire people. The best business I've ever started is when there was only one other person besides me. We started our first product for $2000. We sold eight months later for $10,000,000. We outsourced almost the entire business (by the way, the one bad thing about this is that Google wouldn't buy us because of this). It's not as good as it sounds. I'm an idiot and lost a good chunk of the money later. But at least I didn't hire anyone. G) CLEAR ROLES A lot of partnerships fail because there are no clear roles defined. Like, the two partners are "co-CEOs" so nobody knows who to talk to. This is BS. There have to be clear rules. I have a lot of examples. I'll give one I'm dealing with right now. These are the roles of the founders: one person is a scientist - he makes the product. one person is an accountant - he does the books one person is a good business guy and has been involved in startups - he makes the deals and finds partnerships one person is good at raising money - he raises money and I forget who is CEO. One of them. It doesn't matter. Each is the final world on what he is good at. You can even divide up equity equally according to categories like this (and so some people might fit into more than one category so they get more equity): - made product - raised money - made sales - manages people - had the idea That's a sample. Not every business is structured so neatly but many are. When I was in a business where we did not have clear rules over who made the final decision, it was a mess. We ended up selling that company but now NONE of the original partners speak to each other anymore. We got lucky we sold that one. H) DON'T TEST If you have a product idea, and you love it, and all your friends tell you its great, don't forget to test. Let's say your product is "protein water" - clear water that has zero calories and 30 grams of protein. BAM! Seems like an amazing idea. Put a Facebook ad up, with the design of the water bottle and say, "30g PROTEIN WATER". Simply see if people click. If noboody clicks, then you have a bad idea. If a lot of people click, then it's a great idea. This is one example. But this is a very important side-rule that most people don't believe: GOOD ENTREPRENEURS ARE RISK-ADVERSE Before you risk, test. Before you leave your job, have customers. Before you hire people, have money in the bank. Before you even create you product, test it. Smart people test. Smart people don't take risks. I) WORRYING ABOUT STUFF YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT Too many people think they have to hire lawyers and accountants and make a logo before they even start their company. Don't do BS stuff. Start your company, make your product, see if people want it, repeat. That's it. One company I don't think I even incorporated until they day before I sold it. Don't have too many meetings. Don't debate forever your list of values. Or your marketing slogan. If you make something people want, then the sale is easy, and you have a company. Period. No matter what your slogan is. So many people ask: but should we be an "S" Corp in Delaware. I don't care. It has nothing to do with how much money you will make. Believe in your product. Believe in helping your customers. Believe you can do it cheaply and always over-deliver and (repeating) HELP. Be risk-averse. Hold onto your money. I can throw some stuff in here about don't get bad investors but that's really a different topic. If you avoid all the mistakes above, then you will have a good shot at having a good business. Trust me on this. I've seen a thousand businesses. You will have a good one if you follow the above ideas (or I should say, avoid the above mistakes). Oh, one more. J) HAVE SEX WITH EMPLOYEES This is a really bad idea. Employees are there to help you get customers, deliver to customers, follow up with customers, and handle the running of your business. Once you start having sex with them, all sorts of bad things happen. I'm not even kidding here. You might fall in love with them. You might have to deal with legal stuff. Other employees might get upset. And once one employee gets upset, that "upset-ness" spreads like a disease. Whenever an employee gossips badly about you, you have to fire them or the disease spreads. This is what starts to happen once you start having sex with employees. I've seen great startups totally blow it because of this. Don't do it. ----- There's a lot of other things that can go wrong, but this is the top. For instance, did you know its important to have a great relationship with your landlord? How come? Because he has to approve if you sell your company. Because suddenly he has a new tenant. But this is a small thing. There are many small things. Running a business is hard. These are the top 10 out of 100 (or 1000) mistakes I have seen. Good luck. And, seriously, don't do what I would do.

I was working at Geek Squad and I had a client who was an older woman with an old laptop (No this is not some kind of joke), it was probably 12–14 years old. It had 512 megs of RAM and was running Windows Vista for reference sack. It was busted six ways from Sunday: dead battery, charging port that I had really work at to get it seated so it would get power, one hinge was totally wrecked, the CD drive was missing its face plate and the drive itself was bent, the screen was cracked, the bezel was being held on by tape… I mean this Laptop had done its tour of duty three times over.Anyway, She was emphatic about getting the screen repaired. But it was one of those situations where it would literally cost more then I could convince myself to tell the client it was worth. So I did something that 99.99% of the time you do not do in computer retail and I asked what was so important about this particular computer.Well turns out her great grand daughter had died 3 years prior and the only pictures she had of her were on that computer, and no one had ever told her that it was possible to move the pictures to something that wasn’t on improvised life support. So I worked with her for a few more minutes to get an idea of what she used her computer for (Little bit of on-line shopping, and some e-mail), then grabbed one of the PC sales team I knew and trusted, gave her the run down on the lady and the situation and asked her to find her a good option for a replacement computer, get her signed up for a data transfer, include a 32 GB flash drive then come back to me.Got her set up with a new laptop, transferred all the files form her told computer to the new computer and the flash drive and signed her up for a 1-on-1 training session so I could help her to learn how to use the new computer, the flash drive, and get her setup with One-Drive so she wouldn’t need to worry about losing her pictures.After it was all said and done she was so grateful for the help and service that she tried to hand me a $50. I couldn’t take it for multiple reason not the least of which being it would have gotten me written up but mostly because it was my job to help people with their computer problems and that was exactly what I had done. Well she insisted on knowing what she could do to thank me.Jokingly, I said “Well we love chocolate chip cookies.” She smiled, said okay, and left. I figured that was it. Came in for my shift the next day to find that she had dropped off what looked like a gross worth of home-made chocolate chip cookies. She must have been up half the night baking them.Cookies make the best thank you!

I worked in telephone customer service for a major US bank five years ago. One afternoon a gentleman called and his voice sounded off. He was more than angry, more than hurt. I kept him talking. Flagged my supervisor to listen in, just in case, my gut said this might be a situation where someone else needed to hear.The man had the worst month of his life. His wife left him for another man, He lost his job. He was behind on his car payment and mortgage. He’d received a call from collections, on both, threatening repossession. His account had been emptied by the wife (I checked). The dog had ...

I completely agree with both Josh and Frank - we started Knot Standard because custom clothes are better than off-the-rack.   We originally launched with a "design it yourself" model, but quickly realized that what made this a good idea - helping other people dress better - needs a heavy focus on the "HELP".   5 years and tens of thousands of garments later, and it's still all about education.  The average customer online makes 2 customizations on their first order (one being adding their name), but 5 on the second order.   The draw with customization is what happens when you "break the seal" - letting people be truly proud of what they've created, and then giving that power to the masses.   Again, 5 years later, and it's still about education.   We speak to every web customer on the phone - they are 1200% more likely to buy if they speak to a real person who helps them through.   We now let people come into showrooms - think permanent pop-ups that are an amazing guy's walk-in closet with a stylist and a bar - and they also spent 45 minutes of every hour educating and styling.So, in the end, I've learned that customization is really about bringing a customer "behind the curtain" with a product.   Take something amazing and mass produced, and make customization simple - but it's only a tool for you to use WITH the customer.   What you're really selling is the service that you put on top of the customization.If you can provide that service, scale it well, and manage the increased complexity of every customer being a unique product, then you are gaining a customer for life by providing a better product than anybody else.   To sum it all up, in both the business, and the product you provide, DETAILS MATTER!