The Sales Professional Mindset and Financial Planning

An individual’s mindset, or established set of beliefs and attitudes, can reveal multitudes about their behavior, including how they approach problem-solving, overcome challenges, and prioritize different aspects of their lives. Mindset can also illuminate areas of strength and weakness. 

The successful sales professional mindset, in particular, can provide insight into what holds someone back or supports their success in selling, while also explaining why sales professionals, in particular, tend to have a more difficult time implementing a comprehensive long-term financial plan. 

Short-Term Focus

Because of the way their performance is measured, sales professionals have to be wired differently than other business people. The sales world operates on very regimented timelines. Successes and failures are measured in short-term intervals, most often by quarter (or annually at best). This approach forces sales executives to prioritize short-term thinking over long-term strategizing, making it easy for them to lose sight of priorities outside their immediate sales deadlines. 

Within the work environment, this hyper focus is an asset that works to help sales professionals:

·Remain motivated to reach ever-changing sales goals. 

·Ensure nothing hinders him or her from reaching their goals.

·Continuously make progress over the short time period.

Largely, it is the sales professionals’ ability to work with a short-term mindset that determines their success, and subsequently, their earning potential. However, it is also this near-sightedness that can cause sales professionals to overlook the long-term financial areas of their lives like retirement planning and investing to build wealth. 

The Money Motivator

From the short-term perspective, sales professionals are motivated day in and day out by the almighty dollar. The ability to meet quarterly targets, and annual incentives for the sake of an increased income is the chief concern. And who can blame them?

Money helps us achieve the types of lives we want to live. It provides us with the resources we need to reside in the neighborhoods we desire, to pay for our children's education and extracurricular activities, take vacations, and enjoy our own hobbies. Yes, it bolsters our bank accounts, but on a deeper level, it creates flexibility in our choices and in our lives.

But over the long-term, we don’t just look at how much money we have or will have, we think about what that money will allow us to do. What are our long-term motivators? Early retirement to travel with a spouse? Giving back to the community? Leaving a legacy for heirs? 

From a short-term perspective, money allows us to maintain a certain lifestyle. But, if we don’t apply long-term considerations to our money and our motivations now, we put ourselves at risk of not being able to sustain that lifestyle or benefit from what our money can do for us in the future.

Taking a Step Back

Unfortunately, the sales professionals’ short-term mindset that garners so much monetary success in the workplace, can function as a blinder when it comes to long-term concerns like asset protection, risk management, and long-term financial planning. And it is expressly this trend amongst successful salespeople that motivated me to shift my own professional trajectory towards helping to address these challenges.

I help sales professionals take a step back and look at the bigger, deeper picture to ensure they aren’t neglecting long-term personal and financial goals in favor of short-term accumulation motivators. By taking over the reins on their financial planning and investment management, I allow motivated sales executives to remain hyper focused on their next high-level sales with passion and confidence. 

If you are a sales professional and are looking for a trusted ally to keep an eye on your big picture financial plan so that you are able to remain steadfast to your short-term sales goals, Meenes Wealth could be the right fit for you. Contact me today to learn more about how I partner with sales professionals and executives to achieve more.