Lately, I watched the world’s top two tennis players go head to head.

Centre court, a packed stadium, and years of preparation distilled into a few sets.

And only one thing decided the match.

It wasn’t competence.

Both could hit every shot in the book. Both had decades of training behind them. Both wanted the win just as badly as the other.

What decided the match?

Unforced errors.

The points they were giving away… not the ones they were earning.

I sat with that thought long after the match ended. Because I see the exact same pattern in sales week after week.

The painful ones are the deals lost to the team’s own avoidable misses.

• The conversations that didn’t land.
• The CxO meetings that went flat.
• The points given away, not the ones earned.

Today, I want to share three unforced errors I’m observing in sales teams right now.

Three more are coming in part two.

One: Weak peripheral intelligence.

Are your teams tracking the big trends, the geopolitical shifts, the industry currents that are reshaping your client’s world?

This is the homework that rarely shows up on a CRM dashboard, but it’s the homework the CxO notices first.

The inability to connect those dots and translate them into implications for the client shows up as a lack of altitude in the conversation.

The CxO senses it within minutes.

Two: No reflection on what was learned last week.

A question I ask in every weekly review:

What did you learn from your customers this week?

Many go blank.

Because they walked in without curiosity, and walked out without reflection.

Customer meetings are not a transaction to be checked off. Each one is a window into the client’s world that closes the moment you walk out. And if you don’t pause to look through it, the insight is gone.

After every customer meeting, I encourage your teams to ask themselves:

→ What did I learn about this person – their role, the systems they work in, the constraints they operate under?

→ What did I learn about their organisation and their industry?

→ What risks are they not yet seeing?

The teams that make this a ritual compound their understanding week after week.

Three: Limited interest in who else is at the table.

In my own client conversations, I often ask:

Who else is serving you? And among all of them, who’s adding the maximum value?

That single question gives me two things.

→ Where the client genuinely perceives value

→ Who, organisationally, is delivering it

It also tells me something the client may not say out loud – where the white space is. Where the gaps are. Where I might step in, not by competing, but by complementing what’s already working.

Most sales conversations skip this entirely. They assume they are the only voice in the client’s ecosystem. They aren’t. They never were.

That hunger to see the big picture, to understand the client more deeply, to read the competitive landscape with more nuance… is exactly what’s missing when unforced errors begin to creep into the rhythm of selling.

Each of these chips away at the volume, velocity, and quality of how your team engages.

The good news is that none of these require new tools, new training programmes, or new hires.

They require attention, curiosity, and the discipline to slow down enough to actually look.

Sit with these.

Three more are coming in part two.

Of these three, which one is showing up most often in your team’s weekly reviews?

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