I’m in a witty mood today, so allow me to share a few witty sales truths because… well… they’re true.
1. Sales should be an Olympic sport.
Forget the 100 metres. Try chasing a prospect for three months only to hear, “Can you call me next week?”
Sales is physically demanding. The events include chasing leads, handling objections, making presentations, standing at exhibitions for hours, and somehow still smiling after hearing your tenth “No” before lunch.
If your fitness tracker says you’ve climbed 12 flights of stairs today, first confirm it wasn’t simply the 12 times you’ve gone up and down the office following up on the same prospect. Both count as cardio.
And don’t underestimate the emotional endurance required. One minute you’re celebrating a signed sale. The next minute your biggest customer informs you they’ve “gone in another direction.”
No wonder good salespeople develop thick skins and comfortable shoes.
The point is simple. Sales is not a desk job. It requires energy, resilience and stamina. If you’re constantly exhausted, your prospects will hear it in your voice before they see it on your face.
Here’s some free witty sales advice: cardio isn’t just for the gym—it’s for the follow-up marathon too.
So stay fit. Drink water. Get enough sleep. Walk when you can. Because tomorrow morning, the starting gun goes off again.
2. Witty sales advice— Your CRM is not you.
Businesses are investing millions in Customer Relationship Management systems, Artificial Intelligence, automation and dashboards.
Excellent. But. The best sales advice I can give you about technology? Use it to remember their name, not to replace your presence.
Because let’s not confuse having customer data with having customer relationships.
Your CRM remembers every customer. Your customers, however, remember you.
So, go ahead and install the latest cutting-edge technology you can afford. Build dashboards with enough graphs to impress Space X.
Just remember that all the customer really wants is for the M-PESA transaction to go through, the ATM to dispense cash, the internet to stay connected, someone easily acessible to respond to queries, and the order to arrive on time.
When those things fail, customers don’t curse the software. They curse your company. They curse you. Technology can support relationships. It cannot substitute them.
Even AI—I dare say—cannot replace empathy, trust, ownership and genuine human interaction.
A customer who feels heard is remarkably forgiving. A customer who feels ignored becomes remarkably vocal. Customer facing activities trump, air- and monitor facing activities any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
3. Sales experience is overrated.
Before experienced salespeople send me strongly worded emails, let me clarify.
Experience matters. But only if you’ve actually been learning. Experience isn’t measured by the number of years you’ve occupied a sales seat. It’s measured by the number of lessons you’ve extracted from the challenges you’ve faced.
I’ve watched people with 15 years of experience lose business to someone with only six months of relentless curiosity. I’ve also met people with ten years of experience who, unfortunately, have one year’s experience repeated ten times.
That’s not experience. That’s repetition.
If you got your driving licence seven years ago but parked the car immediately afterwards, you don’t have seven years of driving experience. You have about ten learner hours.
The calendar doesn’t create competence. Practice does. Reflection does. Feedback does. Mistakes do.
The best salespeople remain students. They read, consume content. They experiment. They ask questions. They observe. They borrow ideas from other industries. They review lost sales with the same enthusiasm they celebrate won ones.
As the Kiswahili saying goes, ukiujua huu, huu huujui. The moment you think you’ve mastered sales, the market changes, customers evolve and competitors invent something you’ve never seen before.
Sales success carries the seeds of its own destruction because success has an annoying habit of making people comfortable.
Witty sales advice
If you ignore every other piece of sales advice here, don’t ignore this: stay curious or stay average. Keep learning. Because in sales, the day you think you’ve arrived is usually the day someone younger, faster and more curious overtakes you.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a prospect who asked me to “call next week.”
That was three months ago.
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