5/3/2024-Forget Q3 and 4, what about ’25 and ’26?

While a life in sales provides a constant dopamine hit, you must think about what life looks like down the road. You want your skills to be relevant for a long while, which means planning and growing.

Whether you’ve been selling for 2, 12, or 20 years, you need to plan for the future. It comes fast.

While you can’t predict how long you’ll be in your current role (longer is better, of course), think about where you want to be in a few years and what skills and competencies you’ll need to develop to get there.

It’s good to be hyper-focused on hitting your quarterly number, but it’s vitally important to plan the long game and develop a skills growth plan.

Open to a blank page in your notebook and write the answer to this question: "Where am I going to be in two years?"

After staring at it for 10 minutes (jk), make it easier by focusing your answer on your skills, not your physical location or company. …where are your skills going to be in the next two years?

Make a list of what you need to work on, and over the next few hours, add details of your path to improving each skill.

How tired are you of hearing pundits and YouTube experts tell you to "follow your passion"?

Sure, passion is important in the sales life, but there’s much more behind why you battle each day as a professional seller.

You obviously love the chase….the thrill of landing the big fish onto the boat. And you love the mental challenge, too; figuring out how the many pieces of the puzzle fit together on each account is fun!

While your life in sales provides a constant dopamine hit and makes today exciting, you must think about what life will look like down the road. You want your skills to be relevant for as long as you want, which means planning and growing.

To help, interview ANY and EVERY person you know who has already gone down the path. Find out what they’ve learned and missed along the way and what they can share with you about managing a sales career.

You don’t have to conduct all of your said "interviews" this month, but it’ll feel good to start working on the long game.

"Do something that you are, not just what you love."

That’s a great quote from this Ted Talk by career counselor Ashley Stahl.

Ashley may give you some ideas on managing your sales career, which will obviously get harder. (Quotas never go down, right?)

You understand the realities of your profession and know your current gig might end next month…or in five years. So you’ll want to over-prepare for everything, even if next year – let alone 2026 – feels like an eternity.