A good friend of mine, Aaron Howard, asked me to write some thoughts down on Sales and Sale Management.  I have known Aaron for some 20 years and have to say it’s never boring around him. I owe him a lot.

For the past 25 years I have been in sales.  Mostly helping small businesses (companies with annual revenue under $25 million) with financing their operations. As a sales person, on the line, and later as a sale manager, the goal has always been to contact more prospects and close more deals!  As some like to say, “Sales is a contact sport!” and they would be correct.

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Gallup’s extensive research in employee engagement describes in no uncertain terms the failure of today’s organizations to engage employees. Its research shows that 69 percent of a typical workforce is disengaged. But the news gets even worse. A full 29 percent of the workforce is more than just disengaged, they are categorized as “actively disengaged.” That means these employees choose to do things that disrupt or harm the business. Sadly, these disruptive people are often the most creative and capable people in the organization who express their extreme frustration in the only way they have found possible, trouble.

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If you believe that most human beings actually care about their work and want to make positive contributions, then it’s easy to see how frustration can get displaced in unproductive ways. If you work inside an organization where it doesn’t matter how much you care because nothing comes of it, what would you do. I have to admit to some actions in my early career that clearly caused trouble when I once worked for a boss who was a jerk.

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