Is it easy to get burned out in a sales job that is strictly performance-based?

When you remain long enough in a situation where your heart is not in whatever you are engaging with, you get burned out.

If your work environment is based on giving up the Love for the money, and you remain subscribed to this approach, you are definitely walking on the path to burn out.

Whether something sells or not is based on the totality of the situation, not just the salesman. Look at how Elon Musk’s Cybertruck has sold a record amount after its presentation during which the break-proof glass broke twice. Without them spending anything to advertising, just presenting a product in an unveiling event, they reached 250K preorders within a week according to Elon Musk’s tweet. Now can any salesman out of the blue sell 250K preorders of any other truck on the market? How have they been so successful then? Because they worked for the totality of the situation, not for money. They have been working for many many years to really create something truly beneficial for humanity, appearing in the form of novel, financially viable electrical vehicles, which also has the sense to appeal to the aesthetic/utilitarian/futuristic aspirations of the targeted customers. Basically, they are really putting the Love into this, and it is bound to succeed in one way or another as long as they do it in a committed way. To further clarify, they are expanding the horizons of humanity, not just building electric vehicles.

Now, as a salesman, if you are not one with the totality of the situation, and push against reality to meet performance expectations and judge yourself based on your success of meeting these expectations, you are in a state where you have given up the Love for the money. I am not saying this is a conscious decision. This is usually a learned, cultural, conditioning thing; this is related to our ignorance of the deeper aspects of the human system, the deeper realities of life. Ignorance means, we are ignoring at that moment, we are at the moment going by our conditioning to ignore.

What will happen after some time is that you will feel drained, because you will be spending your energy resisting reality, resisting the totality of the situation.

What to do then?

For example, if you are selling an inferior product, you must look realistically at how much it is supposed to sell, how much it should sell actually. Should it even sell? Will it fill a need currently, or should it be dumped completely as landfill? Maybe sold at a good discount so that the poor can buy it and benefit from it? You must look at your audience and their needs. You must know your audience. You must really connect with them in a human to human basis. Not as a salesman/customer basis. You must see yourself as a servant serving the customers, not as a salesman selling products and getting their money/getting your paycheck/commission. If you love them this way, you will get the chance to better understand their needs and have a more realistic appraisal of the situation. Then you can better understand how much you can expect to sell in a given amount of time. But selling won’t be your main concern here, serving will be.

If the owner of the company can have this wise approach, then the suffering from the sales process will be removed for everyone. In an ignorantly led company, the sales expectations (consequently performance expectations on the sales people) will be unrealistic, because the leaders will be disconnected from their audience and connected to the idea of selling to earn more and more money, essentially a mental cocoon in their minds. The sales people will then be subjected to the effects of this mental cocoon.

As a sales person, for your happiness, you must assume as wide as possible sense of responsibility about your company and its audience. This is loving your company and your audience. This is bringing your awareness to your company and your audience (and the rest of the world). This is becoming one with the totality of the situation. Your role may be a salesman role, but you can be even more capable than your CEO if you follow this path. You can offer so much to your company and your audience by having a greater understanding of both, and also more of the world. Products are improved and positioned this way best. The opposite of this path is just identifying being a salesman whose only role and value is to sell (and meet sales quotas). You don’t truly care about the company, you don’t truly care about the audience, you don’t truly care about the world. You are just interested in doing your job and meeting the expectations. This is your sense of responsibility shrunk to a bare minimum. This is blocking your heart’s Love from expanding into the world and this is fixating your Awareness on a very small role/mental cocoon. You will feel that your energy is being spent and spent on trying to break out of this cocoon but as you resist, and spend energy to keep yourself small, you will feel burned out.

So.. stop resisting and awaken to the Love that you are. And start expanding your wings. Assume a widening, an encompassing sense of responsibility. In your own way, let your CEO/managers/coworkers see the light, too. At the minimum, your happiness will be a more conscious process. Your position in the world or the company may change, or remain the same, but you will start feeling an inner sense of success. Be ready to become aware how you also have been keeping yourself in your own mental limitations. This is not a philosophy. You actually can bring true value on the table by genuinely loving everything in your experience and expanding your awareness to everything in your experience.