An activity trap is any activity that allows you to spend time on an endeavor that feels like work, but produces few if any benefits.

When you are managing a pharmaceutical sales force or any high tech sales force, you always look for people who are particularly busy, yet unproductive. One of the giveaways is they are always calling on existing customers or partners, but they never produce new business.

There is a very real reason for this: they are afraid of hearing the word "NO."

Pharmaceutical sales candidates can often exhibit the activity trap habit as well. They are not prepared to hear "NO" again and again, so they generate, unconsciously, all kinds of unproductive and sometimes useless activity.

They will spend hours writing a resume, adjusting font types and working on

tiny editing changes. A resume is no longer the point of the spear.

Everyone has one, they are virtually impossible to use for differentiation;

when a hiring manager posts a job, he or she gets hundreds, perhaps thousands of resumes.

Another activity trap, this one more expensive, is having a third party write a pharmaceutical sales rep candidate's resume. This can cost hundreds of dollars and often serves as an activity trap.

One of the worst offenders in the activity trap area is paying for pharmaceutical "training." Many candidates spend hundreds, sometimes

thousands of dollars getting trained by the pharmaceutical trade groups.

This is a huge activity trap because it has very little chance to lead to any real sales job opportunity and is expensive. Worse, it gives the pharmaceutical sales candidate a false sense of security that he or she now knows all about the industry.

Quite the opposite is true. A hiring sales manager may see this type of training for exactly what it is---a stopgap for someone who has no idea what a pharmaceutical sales rep does, taking training that will in almost no appreciable way make that person more productive.

These courses are not taught by top producing pharmaceutical sales reps.

Such courses are not about how to use the new internet sales models to find new business. They are not about generating differentiating sales skills.

And most of all, they waste a large amount of time and money for people who have little of each. These are activity traps.

One of the most pernicious result of an activity trap is that it will fail, and when it does, the candidate believes he or she has failed, not that the training or resume was not a beneficial place to focus.

This drains the emotional capital of the pharmaceutical sales rep candidate at a time when he or she can least afford it.

So do not get caught in activity traps. Identify them early and cut them out of your life.

Focus on how you can reposition yourself in or near the pharmaceutical industry, build a great story selling new accounts, even if it is for a much smaller, startup firm, and you will not have jumped into an activity trap.