Perpetual Development, Inc.
©2007 Perpetual Development, Inc.

Sales Complacency
By Brent Patmos

It’s easy to become complacent in selling & many times it happens when we are at the top of our game! Why? Because our behavior is driven in part by the sales environment and climate in which we exist. With every closed deal, sales win or great commission check comes the confidence that if we just keep doing what we’re doing we’ll be hugely successful and increase sales for a very long time. In today’s competitive sales climate this approach has danger written all over it and that danger is spelled c-o-m-p-l-a-c-e-n-c-y.

Early in my sales career I had the privilege of working with Fred Meijer, who still remains as one of the great entrepreneurial retailers of the last seventy plus years. In a moment of individual mentoring and development, Fred shared a piece of advice about success that sticks vividly in my sales brain to this day. Fred told me that “every successful person, regardless of profession, runs with a healthy fear of the competition and for those that sell for a living that healthy fear is what keeps them taking action as a habit.”

Success spoils salespeople and breeds complacency when we forget the elements of behavior and action that brought us to that point of sales success. We need to constantly remind ourselves of the importance of action in the prevention of complacency. When we continually and consciously develop and practice The Action Habit we are deliberately eliminating complacency and purposefully increasing our edge, advantage and sales success. And there’s one other thing; Salespeople who have The Action Habit make a lot of money!