The Biggest Sales Excuses You Need to Stop Making in 2018

Winners make things happen. Losers make excuses. Regardless of the field, this time-tested principle consistently rings true. In sales, sellers who cite convoluted reasons to explain poor performance, rather than proactively doing something about it often remain — unsurprisingly — at the bottom of the success ladder.

But these hitches only balance out the selling dynamic: competent sales professionals reap eye-popping rewards, while laggard performers fall behind. Anyone without grit, determination, and drive will surely fail in the unforgiving terrain of selling.

[Tweet “For losers, every failure = excuses. For winners, every success can be achieved by execution”]

With the new year just around the corner, it is high time to re-examine the many excuses sales professionals make (and what to do instead).

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Validity/Verdict: Blaming other departments is a low punch even when some of your points are valid. The main culprit in this area is — overwhelmingly — the lack of coordination and synchronization among teams.

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Validity/Verdict: Leaders sometimes do set high, overly optimistic goals. However, question their judgement only if no one else, or very few outliers have achieved those objectives. If a fair number of sales professionals are actually achieving their quotas, then citing this factor is a lame excuse.

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Validity/Verdict: Product development and branding are extremely tricky. But guess what — nothing is perfect. Cite the very best handsets offered by Apple or Samsung and you’ll still find critical naysayers in both camps.

Value Generation: As a sales professional, your job is to highlight the positive aspects of your product and propose reasonable workarounds for its shortcomings. Better yet, sharing your insight into how customers perceive your product can help your company’s product designers to build much better products down the road.

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Validity/Verdict: Unless you’re Tim Ferriss, time is going to be scarce. Time is extremely valuable in sales. The sooner you close, the better your metrics. More time spent on prospecting keeps your pipeline healthy. Blaming time is like unleashing a scapegoat and ascribing responsibility to everything else but yourself. In most cases, all it takes is having clear priorities and an effective time management system.

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Validation/Verdict: Markets and economies fluctuate for various reasons. So does consumer behavior — sometimes, in surprising ways which you can exploit for your brand. If competitors still sustain profitability, then panicking and whining about supply and demand won’t get you anywhere. Your rivals are doing something right and you’re not.

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Validation/Verdict: Groundwork is hard and tends to get your hands dirty. In sales, that translates to the “floor,” where sales reps do much of the heavy lifting. Prospecting and engaging leads represent two of the most challenging and frustrating aspects of selling, and it’s alright to vent your anger once in a while. But don’t stop there.

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Value Generation: Make an objective assessment of your sales organization. Don’t base your evaluation on your feelings or emotions. If everyone on the team finds it difficult to meet quotas, schedules, and other metrics, then something might well be seriously flawed. If there’s a consensus that something drastic has to be done to turn things around, then you can’t start whining in order to win.

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Validity/Verdict: It’s easy to sit and make excuses about cold calling, but the fact remains that it STILL works, and many successful organizations are crushing it right now with outbound. If you’re failing with cold calling, it’s because you lack motivation, proper training, and you’re not serving relevant offers to the right people at the right time.

Value Generation: Ask yourself why you feel this way. Dig deep and be brutally honest. Cold calling may not be for you. There are other sales techniques that work too, so perhaps those may suit your strengths better. Listen to your call recordings. Get call coaching and make strides forward.

Responsibility and personal accountability are among the most critical traits in successful sales professionals. The ability to point fingers and make lame excuses is not. That means assessing personal culpability serves as the default reaction of high performers every time things go wrong.

Use setbacks as launchpads for proactive solutions to personal shortcomings (skills, technique, know-how) or to systemic problems in your company (tools, organization, culture, methodologies). It’s a lot better to find a way to address challenges than to find an excuse to dodge blame. One helps make things better. The other just allows mediocrity to linger.

Remember, a culture of excellence and success will never accept excuses.

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