Why do People Fail in Sales?

In twelve years I've built an international distribution network including opening three foreign markets and living in Malaysia and Singapore when we opened there. My work included extensive prospecting, recruiting, training and selling. Back here I've done even more of all that as the bulk of our business is USA. So my experience in hands on work with distributors is extensive and diverse.

Failure in selling is as Skip and Gold Card have pointed out quite common - everyone knows this. So we who are successful in sales ponder the big WHY.

We know there are many answers: it's a bad fit/not the right person for sales; company training is poor; company management and support if poor; personal motivatioin is weak. Pat nails it all down!

One thing rarely mentioned that happens too often in real estate, telemarketing, medical sales and network marketing (to name a few) is that people are poorly screened but recruited anyway because "some might work out." The worst of network marketing practices borrowed this concept from door-to-door salesman in the last century that was also later put into practice across the boards in many sales force situations.

Being highly selective about who you hire for sales, who you recruit, and who you sell to will eliminate many failure problems. The rest of success has to do with quality training - not the new age kind of mystical stuff Gold Calling likes to disparage and rightfully so, but also old age systems that are not relevant to today's informed and IT oriented population.

SO selectivity in who you hire and in how/what you train is everything. I've certainly found that to be true!

MitchM