When you think about your sales career, how far ahead are you looking? A month? A quarter? A year?

If you’re like most, you’re thinking about the commissions you’ll get next week or next month, not next year or beyond.

The constant hustle to meet KPI’s, to close that next deal. It can feel like you're always sprinting, never taking a moment to catch your breath.

But here's the thing. The most successful salespeople, they're not just thinking about the next sale. They're thinking about the next few years.

I learned this lesson the hard way.

Early in my career, I was all about the quick win. I'd do whatever it took to close a deal. And for a while, it worked. I was hitting my numbers, earning big commissions.

But then something changed. The market shifted. My go-to tactics stopped working. And suddenly, I found myself scrambling, watching my pipeline dry up and my income along with it.

It was a wake-up call. I realized that I'd been so focused on the present that I'd neglected to plan for the future. I hadn't been building the skills, the relationships, the resilience that would carry me through the ups and downs of a long sales career.

I started making changes, looking at the impact I could make on the James of next 5 years as opposed to the James of next week.

There are 3 main areas I focus on.

Opportunities

I see what is happening out in the market at the moment. There are a whole lot of good salespeople without a solid offer to work with.

A good portion of them were at one of the big 3 that recently went south.

Things were really good there for a while, but it didn’t last.

But how do you take a longer time horizon approach to that?

My approach - I map out the opportunities that I want to work with over the next 5 years and engage with them accordingly.

I connect with people all through their company.

Build relationships, familiarity at the least.

They expect my engagement on their posts, oftentimes I hop on Zoom calls with certain movers and shakers within.

I ask for nothing.

I know that when they need a good salesperson, I’ll most likely be the one who gets the call.

Pipeline

I have gone back and forth on the topic of pipeline over my sales career.

When I was in corporate, I was not that good at sales so most went through to follow-up.

When I was becoming a “closer”, the idea of pipeline wasn’t in my field of vision.

A stack calendar of leads right in front of me, why even bother?

But now, it sits somewhere in the middle.

Possibly due to the size of the deals I’m closing and the type of client base.

I know that I need to treat these prospects well so that if they don’t buy, which happens often, they will still take a call from me in the future.

Or as often happens, be prepared to call me when things change.

Sales Skills

This is a big one, and one that has caused me a good amount of self-imposed anxiety along the way.

When I first got into the remote sales space, I put so much pressure on myself to learn all of the sales things at once.

I would read and study and read, only to feel like I was making tiny improvements.

That’s the point though.

Tiny improvements are still improvements.

But then I’d feel it slow, and I’d either pivot to something different, a different sales style of some psychology, I’d feel overly confused for a while, sometimes I’d have a break.

The mistake I was making; I was trying to learn it all at once.

I would go through stages where I’d stop learning new things for a while.

If you look at these 3 areas over longer terms, it seems a little less turbulent.

You can see how things come together.

How things will be for you in the years to come.