---
title: "If You Have These 10 Traits, You're No Longer Fit for Sales: Change or Get Out!"
description: "Sales is a war without gunpowder in peacetime, a game of gladiators. Sales personnel aging manifests in many aspects: outdated marketing concepts, corporate aging, personal emotional aging, professional ethics aging, interpersonal relationship aging, professional capability aging, mindset aging, and mental state aging. The factors causing aging include changes in marketing environment, personal life issues, bad habits, over-reliance on experience, loss of passion, diminishing returns, neglect of brand management, lack of career planning, corporate operational aging, and interpersonal relationship aging."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2016-02-29"
language: "en"
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markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/if-you-have-these-10-traits-you-re-no-longer-fit-for-sales-change-or-get-596fb1e4.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Ha-a10HXZKo_uH6yV3U6aQ"
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---

# If You Have These 10 Traits, You're No Longer Fit for Sales: Change or Get Out!

> Sales is a war without gunpowder in peacetime, a game of gladiators. Sales personnel aging manifests in many aspects: outdated marketing concepts, corporate aging, personal emotional aging, professional ethics aging, interpersonal relationship aging, professional capability aging, mindset aging, and mental state aging. The factors causing aging include changes in marketing environment, personal life issues, bad habits, over-reliance on experience, loss of passion, diminishing returns, neglect of brand management, lack of career planning, corporate operational aging, and interpersonal relationship aging.

**Sales: It's a war without gunpowder in peacetime, a gladiatorial game among the strong.**
Sales personnel aging manifests in many aspects: outdated marketing concepts and thinking, corporate operational aging, personal emotional aging, professional ethics aging, interpersonal relationship aging, professional capability aging, mindset aging, and mental state aging. Overall, the factors causing aging include the following:

**1. Changes in the marketing environment and the volatile business competition lead to outdated concepts and thinking among sales personnel.**
In the face of new business and marketing revolutions, the sales experience and resources accumulated over years may no longer be valuable due to unsuitability to the new environment, and may even become shackles. To solve this problem, it is necessary to constantly "brainwash" sales personnel, instilling new marketing concepts to break free from old mindsets. In fact, "changing the brain" of veteran salespeople is more difficult than training new ones, leading some companies to prefer new hires over veterans. New salespeople lack traditional marketing concepts and fixed thinking patterns, making it easier for them to accept new marketing ideas. As long as their concepts are correct, deficiencies in work proficiency can be easily compensated. Resistance to change is an inherent mindset of many salespeople. Thoroughly changing their thinking and concepts is an extremely important task and a strong guarantee for implementing the company's annual strategy.

**2. Personal emotional aging towards the sales profession due to lifestyle and family reasons.**
Salespeople often spend long periods away from home. Inability to resolve issues related to romance, marriage, children, and parents causes anxiety in a significant portion, severely affecting work. The conflict between career and family has always been a factor affecting sales personnel stability that marketing managers face. Many companies are implementing localization of hiring for middle-level, grassroots supervisors, and grassroots staff. Of course, this poses a greater challenge to the management of the marketing system. Solving emotional issues such as salespeople's sense of security and family harmony has become an important aspect of ideological construction for HR and sales management departments, and is one of the links to enhance the execution, cohesion, and centripetal force of the sales organization.

**3. Professional ethics aging due to salespeople developing bad sales habits.**
The sales environment is a big dye vat. When first entering the field, without noticing management loopholes, opportunities, or temptations, they may behave properly. But when loopholes and temptations are fully exposed, those with poor self-discipline may make mistakes. To solve this, moral and legal preaching is necessary, but more importantly, plugging loopholes in sales management as much as possible to reduce opportunities for mistakes. The better the team, the stricter the management, the more standardized the systems, the fewer loopholes, and the longer the professional career cycle of salespeople.

Salespeople's mindsets change with age and growth, including career planning awareness, self-management awareness, self-control awareness, and interpersonal relationships. If salespeople can summarize and review from these four aspects, continuously adjust their mindset, they can avoid aging phenomena.

**4. Overemphasis on experience and neglect of innovation leads to sales capability aging.**
The value of experience is only effective in static or slowly changing environments. In a changing environment, the depreciation rate of experience is proportional to the speed of environmental change. The changing market environment demands keen observation, adaptability, and innovation. Many salespeople and sales managers overvalue experience, thereby losing the motivation or opportunity to learn new skills.

With a volatile competitive environment, changing channel formats, rapid terminal changes, regional differences, and different consumption habits, the inertia of experience can lead to aging if one blindly emphasizes experience and neglects re-learning and innovation. This is an era where re-learning determines destiny.

**5. As time in sales extends, professional passion wanes, leading to mindset aging.**
Most salespeople experience mindset aging, though at different times. When first starting, they typically have a challenger's mindset. After working for a while, the monotony of clients, tasks, and problems causes a significant shift, making work a burden rather than a pleasure. Mindset aging can be adjusted through self-motivation and external incentives from the company. A company president once summarized: Anyone who has been in sales at one place for over three years should be promoted, transferred, or dismissed; otherwise, their performance is unlikely to improve significantly.

Passion can overcome wisdom. With necessary professional knowledge, salespeople must have intrinsic drive—passion. Passion is an emotional need, especially for grassroots salespeople eager to grow. Being good at self-motivation and maintaining a competitive state is a good way to avoid mindset aging.

**6. Due to the principle of diminishing marginal returns, insufficient motivation leads to mental state aging.**
Some salespeople, after developing good markets, find developing poor markets too difficult and unrewarding compared to good markets, losing motivation. Some, after working hard for a while, feel it's harvest time and rest on their laurels, losing the drive to dig deeper. Some feel their abilities have grown and they have more resources, so they should be promoted, and start bargaining with the company... Changes in mental state lead to insufficient motivation, affecting performance improvement and capability enhancement.

Let performance speak—this is the duty of salespeople. Often, aging salespeople are limited by current circumstances, thinking that as long as they grow a bit each year and meet the company's plan, they can rest easy. Average salespeople lose the motivation to improve, while capable and promising ones lose opportunities for challenges and career development. Salespeople should dare to challenge their performance goals, not just follow the script, challenge their limits, grow themselves, and avoid aging.

**7. Salespeople neglect brand management awareness and fail to develop into marketing professionals.**
Many salespeople focus on dealer management, channel construction, and terminal management, ignoring the arrival of modern three-dimensional marketing models. Sales models have changed over the years. Salespeople who ignore marketing work patterns, don't understand product management, point-of-sale brand image management, trade marketing, and channel brand enhancement strategies, and just act on inertia, will inevitably age.

**8. Lack of self-career planning and self-goal management causes a fog-like phenomenon among salespeople.**
Companies are in dynamic development, and human resource development is the biggest change brought by corporate growth. Often, due to development needs, companies adjust their organization, marketing management processes, systems, and HR allocation annually. Salespeople often lose direction at these times, leading to resistance to change and inability to understand corporate changes, resulting in negativity, hesitation, resistance, and finally frequent job changes, physical and mental exhaustion, leading to aging.

**9. Corporate operational aging and management instability trigger mindset aging among salespeople.**
1. The company introduces unreasonable management systems and harsher sales commission systems. When salespeople have no hope of appeal to headquarters, they may resist in extreme ways.
2. Changes in senior marketing management: new executives may not fully respect subordinate salespeople or regional managers, and some old meritorious employees may demonstrate in this way.
3. The company's products age, marketing investment lags, salespeople at the grassroots don't get support from headquarters, and reimbursable bills are not honored, so they resort to gray methods to cover daily expenses of field offices.
4. Grassroots salespeople propose beneficial suggestions, but the company never accepts them and insists on executing obviously wrong plans, causing extreme disappointment. Since executing wrong market plans will greatly affect personal performance and reduce commissions, salespeople take risks to find shortcuts to make up for the lost commission.

Corporate operational aging and management instability causing mindset aging is particularly prominent in private enterprises and should be highly valued by owners and senior management.

**10. Interpersonal relationship aging causes salesperson aging.**
This is most evident in private enterprises and consumes the most marketing combat effectiveness. Looking at the structure of sales personnel, "liquefaction" and "solidification" are equally serious. In some sales organizations, internal staff turnover is like a revolving door, with frequent turnover hindering steady business growth. In others, the opposite extreme: long-term ultra-stable personnel structure, with employees' mindsets aging and solid as a rock, infinitely consuming the company's efforts to cultivate the market. At the same time, personal interests and derived "internal factions" corrode team cohesion to a considerable extent. Complex interest entanglements and "insider control" are mutually causal. Originally clear personnel management goals become blurred due to regional background colors, and quantified assessment indicators become "political tools" for various regional lords to compete for power and resources. Excluding institutional management factors, lack of work continuity is also a result of complex personnel disputes. There are two main manifestations: First, job-hopping causes personnel shocks. The departure of a regional supervisor may lead to the loss of a batch of business backbone, effectively causing work stagnation. Second, changing people changes styles, causing inconsistency. The company lacks a unified marketing model in the market, so when regional supervisors change, new people often bring new tactics, completely overturning the original, increasing market operation costs and wasting all previous efforts.

Therefore, companies must take action in personnel systems to truly activate veteran salespeople who are familiar with corporate culture, enhance their confidence, and further improve core competitiveness.

The above is based on my years of experience in sales management. It's my personal view. Over ten years, I've experienced the transition from grassroots sales to sales management. I summarize some aging phenomena for peers to share. Please forgive any shortcomings.

**-END-**

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