The Sales Archaeologist

You don't need to be a sales development expert to realize that complacency can be the death blow of any sales person or sales force. Complacency is defined as "A feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy". Sounds bad and it is bad.

Usually we see this manifesting itself in salespeople - and they don't care about missing their number, losing a deal, not helping with company objectives and they are more than happy to just live on their salary. But even successful and accomplished people can be struck with complacency - but it shows up a little differently.

This blog post was prompted by something I read about Napoleon at Waterloo. He was successful and accomplished, earlier in his career he had been anything but complacent but now he was satisfied and over confident in his abilities. He had been outnumbered before and worked around it. He had been outflanked and still won. Now he was immune to the danger, unaware that he could be defeated and to a large degree - self satisfied.

Experienced and accomplished sales people can get sloppy and start losing deals because they have been there before, they assume, they think they know, they try to cut corners and this is how complacency can show up in there case.

Regardless of how it shows up - complacency is deadly.