One of the most foolish things (yes at this point I do think it is pretty naive) that a sales rep can do is to send all calendar slots in their own time zone, irrespective of where in the world the prospect is.

I have written about this in the past that sharing the time slots for a meeting – in your prospect’s timezone – is both thoughtful and leads to better conversions given you are removing the barriers for your prospect to act. In product parlance – you reducing the friction to act.

It is proven that anything that our brain decides is gonna take a few steps to do, it is gonna park for later. In the above example, my brain is gonna deconstruct the proposed time slots into following steps:

• Convert the shared time slots into my timezone
• Check my calendar for free slots
• Pick a slot

My brain’s gonna think twice before acting. No wonder Calendly is a $3 Billion meeting scheduling startup!

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The next most foolish thing I have seen happen is vendors sending time slots convenient to them. Far too many times I have had to write back to them telling all the time slots they shared are past midnight for my team. Sales and research go hand-in-hand and when I reply to these folks, I know the other party is lazy and have done little to no work on who we are, forget what our needs are.

You would be surprised that most times sales is humane. A dozen sales reps in an org. all selling the same product and yet one outshines all the others – why? Product knowledge? Possible. But I can bet this rep realizes that prospects are humans too and deeply cares about the fact. From being humble in understanding to building a narrative that the prospects will relate to – they will do all things delightful to the prospect. Amongst the common denominators across the companies amongst the best sales reps is this basic realization that prospects are humans too and we all like being cared.

Remember sales is a very people job.