If you're enjoying predictable sales success, then you’ve likely learned that there are the right things to do and then there are the wrong things to do. You need to know both in order to keep yourself on the path to more money and better time management. Below, I have compiled the four sins committed by salespeople that sabotage their weekly success more than anything else I see. Be careful, you have been warned.

Sin #1. Not tracking activity.

As salespeople, we really hate it when our sales managers are on our case about logging our activity in our CRM. I get it. It can be annoying, inefficient, and at times just redundant and yet the salespeople who consistently track their activity tend to be the most successful. Why is that? Well, one obvious reason is that you can look back and access important sales information and prospect criteria, but that is not the type of tracking I am referring to.

I am talking about tracking your actual activity. What I mean is you need to know how much of various activities you did to net your results over time. For example, you need to know how many calls you had to make to get a certain number of conversations and then how many conversations you had in order to set an appointment. You need to track your conversion activity over time in an extremely realistic way so you can find out your predictable sales recipe. Nobody bakes a cake without the recipe. Knowing your numbers is critical to predictable success.

Sin #2. Taking the path of least resistance.

All too often, I see salespeople doing what comes easiest. Yet, it's usually the difficult activity that nets the most results. Things like cold calling, telemarketing, drop-bys, in-person prospecting, et cetera, are often the most painful yet rewarding activities. Sending an email or making a social media post is most often the path of least resistance and therefore the path of least reward.

Successful salespeople swallow the frog early in the morning and get the results. They're not afraid to follow up and be a little assertive when necessary to net appointments and close deals. The path of least resistance is deadly to many entrepreneurs.

Sin #3. Thinking all activity is good activity.

This one kills me. I talk to salespeople every day and ask them what they've been up to. They tell me about how they’ve spent the day researching or prepping their lists. They tell me about how they had some good conversations with some people that didn't really go anywhere. They tell me how they're getting ready to do something really spectacular like preparing for a networking group or to make a few calls. But at the end of the day, the activity that nets results was either nonexistent or barely there.

The fact of the matter is just thinking you did some activity is not going to get you there. Look again at sin number one and sin number two. You need to do the activities that count and that is only going to happen when you get real with yourself and realize that going to the gym and walking on the treadmill for three minutes may be better than nothing, but it's never going to let you hit your weight-loss goals. It's time to get real with weight loss and it's time to get real with sales. Do the tough stuff and do enough of it to get results.

Sin #4. Getting too creative.

This one I must plead guilty to. Oftentimes salespeople don't do the predictable things because they're not tracking their activity and sometimes they don't even know what the predictable things are. So what do we do instead? We get creative. We go and we try something radically different that may have worked for somebody else, but it's probably not going to work for us. Instead of picking up the phone or asking for referrals or doing the stuff that has always worked for us in the past, we get massively creative, try new things, throw them against the wall and hope they'll stick.

Don't get creative until after you've done the stuff that works. Then with all that extra time and money on your hands, you can get creative with a percentage of your day, but don't let your creative fresh ideas constantly be the tip of your sales spear.

I hope these four sins were convicting to you. If you are committing these, as I have done many times, it's time to drink that sobering cup of coffee and dive in and get to work on the things that drive results.