Last weekend, I sat down to watch the world’s top two tennis players go head to head.

Two players. Two careers built on relentless preparation. Two athletes who could hit every shot in the book.

And yet, only one thing decided the match.

It wasn’t competence… both had that in abundance.

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, week after week, in sales teams.

Sharp salespeople, years of training behind them, and deep product knowledge.

And yet, they’re giving away points being given away.

Today, I want to share three unforced errors I’m observing in sales teams right now. Three more will follow in Part 2.

Let’s dive in.

One: Weak Peripheral Intelligence

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

When sellers can’t connect those dots, when they can’t translate macro shifts into specific implications for the client, it shows up as a lack of altitude in the conversation.

The CxO senses it within minutes.

They may not name it but the conversation drops a few floors, and from there, no recovery is possible in the same meeting.

The remedy is rhythm. Curating peripheral intelligence is a discipline, not an event. The teams that win at the CxO altitude have it built into their weekly cadence.

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.

After every customer meeting, ask yourself:

→ 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?

These three questions, asked honestly, can change the quality of the next meeting more than any pitch deck ever will.

Customer meetings are the most expensive learning labs in the company. Treat them as such.

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?

The moment you ask this, the client tells you exactly where you stand in the ecosystem of vendors, partners, and advisors serving them.

Sometimes you discover you’re the lead chair. Sometimes you discover you’ve been losing altitude. Either way, you now have ground truth.

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

Sit with these.

Three more are coming in Part 2.

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

To your success,

Venkat

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