Most common misconception of sales "Wow, sales people just drink coffee, enjoy nice lunches and dinners, entertain customers, and always not in office. So much freedom!"
Let's take a look at the two sides of the sales world:
☕ Coffee Session
Expectation: Networking and casual conversations.
Reality: In reality, the coffee session is a fact-finding mission where you pretend to be discussing the weather and celebrity gossip, while secretly trying to discover whether the project is real, whether the budget exists, who the decision-maker is, why procurement is delaying everything.
🥩 Lunch & Dinner with customer senior management
Expectation: A relaxing gourmet meal.
Reality: Reading body language like an FBI profiler, defending pricing like a lawyer, negotiating like a diplomat, and investigating project status like a detective while pretending you're just enjoying a nice meal.
📱 Sales has a lot of freedom
Expectation: Freedom and flexibility.
Reality: Freedom to answer customer calls all day including weekends, and even while on leave... because annual targets don't go on vacation.
🎯 Sales is easy if you have good and reputable products solution
Expectation: Good products sell themselves.
Reality: The customer agrees you're the technically best solution, commercially competitive, operationally superior, and lowest risk option. Then awards the project to a competitor because they were $500 cheaper.
📈 Quota
Expectation: Management gives you a realistic target.
Reality: Sales is the only profession where exceptional performance is scientifically converted into a larger problem next following year.
💰 Commission
Expectation: Salespeople are getting lucrative commission.
Reality: Sales commission is like an iceberg. People see the payout, but they don't see the months of stress underneath it: countless meetings, presentations, site visits, budget reviews, technical clarifications, procurement negotiations, approval processes, quotation revisions, and endless follow-ups.
📊 CRM
Expectation: A system that helps salespeople.
Reality: A digital diary with endless data entry to prove you're moving in the right direction.
📞 Follow-Up Calls
Expectation: Customers appreciate persistence.
Reality: Professionally asking the same question every week and receiving the same answer in different wording every time
🤝 Relationship Building
Expectation: Building trust with customers.
Reality: Building customer relationships means remembering their birthday, favourite food, hobbies, family stuffs, and holiday plans because your quotation lasts 30 days, but a good conversation lasts much longer
🎉 Closing a Deal
Expectation: Celebration.
Reality: Don't celebrate too early when the PO finally arrives... because that's when the real problems start:
🏭 Factory lead time issue
📦 Shipment delay
🔧 Engineering clarification
📐 Design changes
📋 Documentation requests
💰 Payment term disputes
🚧 Site not ready
⏳ Project delay or postponed
📞 Customer escalation