Issue #95

Why Is Sales So Tiring?

The real reason you (and your team) are drained every day is not because of what you’re doing.

It’s not the number of calls.

It’s not the pressure.

You kicked off your day excited, you had a plan.

But six hours later you’re beat and you’ve closed nothing. That sense of fatigue isn’t from selling.

It’s the invisible work that’s burning you like a candle. And by not controlling that, you let your energy, the energy of your team, leak away.

The Sources

Here are some of the sources of invisible work:

• The mental loops replaying that tricky objection.
• The ego defence waiting to sound smart not just clear.
• The status scan seeing if you're ahead or behind your peers.
• All that internal friction and resistance to getting the job done.

Let me say out loud what we all know, but pretend we don’t, avoiding action uses more fuel than doing it.

This means you don’t burn out because you did too much, but because you thought too much.

Every time you didn’t call because you feared the conversation,

…or send that follow-up because you wanted it perfect,

…or debrief because you didn’t want to admit mistakes, you burnt twice as much effort as if you’d just bit the bullet and done it.

Every “what if they say no?” costs you more energy than the actual “no.”

There’s the worry time, the thinking time, the half done jobs whilst you’re putting it off (they’ll need to be done again), the wear and tear on your identity as a successful seller.

It all adds up.

What You Actually Do

Here’s how to fix it without the obvious excuses of saying you just need to hustle more and get a bigger pipeline (that’s your day job).

You need to stop the leaking away of your energy:

1. Spot the leak - What are you avoiding? What mental real estate is draining fuel? Make a note of when you feel the internal resistance.
2. Do the avoided thing now (badly if you have to) - Take a messy action. Send the unpolished follow‑up. Make the call. Even bad data clears the fog. No thought, just do it.
3. Check how you feel - Did it cost more than it gave you? High-performers feel clearer and more alive even after hard conversations. Gradually this will become your default mode - action.

Why This Matters For Leaders

Your top sellers don’t just close more deals, they are masters of personal energy management.

That’s what separates someone who sells for a living from someone who sells for life.

They also know what heir customers really want, I lay that out here.

The best way to increase a team’s yield is to work on the mid-range performers. The top performers are doing okay, you will just annoy them by interfering.

The bottom performers are suffering from more than energy focus issues, they need to be helped getting interviews for your competition.

Or maybe just help them with their openings, to get clients’ attention more securely, read this.

You can’t scale a team with motivation memes and constant changes to the reward scheme. I have tried and it becomes an exercise in reproducing scenes from “The Office”.

Not the funny ones, either.

You scale it by growing your team, which means removing their energy leaks. And if an individual cannot sort out their leaks then approach it from the team perspective and remove them.

Want to see the hidden cracks that drain every deal?

That’s coming in next week’s Linkedin posts, keep an eye out for them. Here’s a taste, click here.

​

The best way to not waste your energy is to learn what you should be doing in the first place.

My course does that in a few hours, pick your subjects and in ten minute chunks get 35 years experience.

​Sales foundations course here gets you and your team up to speed in the basics, which is where it really matters - Personal skills, Pipeline discipline and Value based selling.

​

Or you can drop me an email about coaching - let me know what particular problems you want to work on. First call free.

And don't forget to forward this to your friends so they will think you are not just a great salesperson, but a generous human being.