14 Ways to Sabotage Your Sales Career

“I wasn’t cut out for sales.”

Maybe. But probably not. Poor training, inadequate support and unrealistic expectations are often responsible for failed sales careers.

What usually makes potentially good salespeople fail has little or nothing to do with poor sales skills. Here are seven common ways salespeople sabotage their own careers:

1) Seeing yourself as special. This fatal “salesperson’s disease” is catching, and it’s transmitted by rubbing shoulders with other salespeople. The major symptom: Believing you’re the reason for the company’s success, and that gives you permission to break the rules and look down on everyone else.

2) Puffing up your record. No salesperson needs to take a course in “The Fine Art of Amplification.” Whether it’s with customers, each other or the boss, exaggeration comes naturally for too many salespeople—who often come to believe their own baloney.

3) Criticizing, but never contributing. You’re quick to explain what’s wrong in every part of the company: why revenues are down, what’s wrong with the product line or who to dump in management. But when asked to contribute your ideas or make suggestions, you have nothing to say.

4) Selling only what you want to sell. Salespeople always have favorite customers, but many also have pet products. They’re not complex, they don’t cause problems and they’re easy to sell. Some come with a robust commission. Whether they’re a good fit for customers is beside the point.

5) Thinking you’ve got it made. From all indications, you’ve worked hard, done a good job and reaped the rewards. You’ve paid your dues. Now it’s time for the boss to cut you some slack so you can set your own pace. It’s time for a little preferential treatment, like getting some of the better leads. If that’s what’s going through your mind, you’re on your way—out, not up.

6) Deciding who will buy and who won’t. You may be smart and savvy with lots of experience. You’ve come face to face with just about every type of customer, and you think you know who will buy and who won’t. All you need is a couple of seconds. It sounds so good, it’s almost convincing. But it’s an exercise in self-deception. In selling, it’s what the customer thinks that counts, not what’s floating around in the salesperson head.

7) Believing customers love you. Sometimes, feedback makes it easy for salespeople to think customers love them: “You’re the best.” “I don’t know what we’d do without you.” “We’re so lucky you came along.” It’s enough to make the ego do somersaults. But here’s the question that really counts: Do your customers respect you?

8) Avoiding asking for help. Many salespeople see themselves as beholden to no one and totally responsible for their destiny. This leads to viewing asking for help as a sign of weakness—even when it costs you customers.

9) Doing just enough to get by. Guided by some preset internal gauge that sets strict limits, you go only so far before banging on the brakes.

10) Ignoring deadlines. It started out early in life: School projects were always late, and they always arrived with a ready-made excuse. Now, your reports are predictably late, along with customer proposals, along with just about everything else. It’s as if deadlines were made for others, not for you.

11) Always making sure you look good. This is about avoiding taking responsibility at all cost. Although you don’t see it, your behavior is so transparent no one trusts anything you say or do.

12) Cutting corners. Shrinking the job to reduce work infects many sales careers. Selling success comes from enhancing the process, not cutting it down to your own size.

13) Laying on the jargon. You believe using all the right words impresses customers and wins them over, so you get the jargon down pat and stay on top of the latest corporate speak. Yes, customers want to be impressed, but not with jargon. What they want is a salesperson who takes time to understand them by asking good questions—someone who makes sure they’re comfortable with their buying decision. Now that’s impressive.

14) Telling a customer you’ll take care of something, then failing to do it. Why worry about it? It’s nothing an “I’m sorry,” a little schmoozing, a bouquet of flowers or a gift card can’t correct. Anyway, it wasn’t that important.

John Graham of GrahamComm is a marketing and sales strategy consultant and business writer.