Joanita Male
One of the things I love most about sales is the competition. And one of the things I dislike most about sales is the competition.
Sales was never the career path I naturally gravitated towards. In fact, I was quite reluctant to pursue it at first. It took the encouragement of a manager who saw something in me that I wasn’t yet convinced I possessed. Looking back, saying yes to that opportunity was one of the best decisions of my career. It has given me some of my biggest wins, a fair share of sleepless nights and lessons I doubt I would have learned anywhere else.
One of those lessons is that sales is a curious profession. You’re expected to compete fiercely while building genuine relationships at the same time. The competition pushes you to perform. To win business. To hit targets. To outperform your peers. The challenge is that numbers are easy to measure, while relationships are not. Nobody puts trust on a scorecard. Nobody celebrates the tenth conversation that finally leads to a client saying yes. Nobody measures the months spent building credibility before an opportunity materialises.
Yet those invisible moments are often what produce the visible results.
Of course, numbers matter. Sales without results is just socialising. But over the years, I’ve come to believe that numbers are usually the outcome of something deeper: relationships patiently built over time.
The best sales people I’ve met seem to understand this. They don’t build relationships to make a sale. They make sales because they’ve built relationships.
In a world obsessed with short term results, it is easy to forget that trust compounds too. And unlike most sales metrics, its value tends to reveal itself over the long term.
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