Being new to sales is tough. Though it’s an exciting and rewarding career choice, it’s also a difficult field to succeed in. There’s so much competition and pressure. There’s a lot of rejection. There are so many competing sales strategies, tactics, and styles that it can be hard to know which ones to use. It’s easy to make costly mistakes. The job can suck out all your motivation and confidence. And many junior sales reps can’t cut it when they first enter the field.

Here are some words of advice that senior sales pros want their junior counterparts to know.

1. Be Honest

Sometimes, it’s hard to be honest in sales. When you know that a certain feature or aspect of your offering would be a deal killer for your customer, it can be tempting to omit it in order to close the sale. It can be easy to lie to your prospects in order to get them to respond to your emails or to call you back.

But senior sales professionals know the devastation that can occur from lying in sales. It never goes well. They want newbies in the industry to know that, no matter how tempting it might be to lie to achieve their goals, that honesty is and always will be the best policy.

Lying will only lead to damage of trust and credibility, and the loss of sales opportunities and business relationships.

2. Do Your Research before a Call or Meeting

It’s one of the most common sales mistakes among junior sales people: they make a call or go into a sales meeting unprepared. Whether it’s because they didn’t have the time, they thought they knew everything they needed to know, or they were just too cocky thinking that they had the sale in the bag, not performing research on a company and its buyers is a huge problem.

All sales people need to learn as much as they can about their prospective customers before speaking to them. This is the only way to ensure that your solution uniquely matches their needs, challenges, and pain points. And it’s the only way to show prospects that you care about their needs and want to help them.

3. It’s OK not to Know Everything

Junior sales people, new to the job, won’t know everything. And that’s OK. They might not have memorized all of their products’ specs. They might not know if a discount is possible. They might not know if a timeline is realistic. Being honest (point #1) and saying so to the buyer is the best path to take in this instance. It will lead to trust and credibility building. And it will eliminate the possibility of awkward situations where sales people promise things that they can’t deliver on or give misinformation that could cost them the sale.

4. I’ve Been There

Sales people will go through a lot in their careers. They’ll have to deal with a lot of rejection. They’ll get in slumps where motivation will dip. They’ll doubt themselves and their skills when they aren’t making sales.

These negative feelings can make junior sales people think that they’re failures on a personal level. But senior sales professionals want them to know that they’ve been there, that everyone’s been there. And that they need to perk up, brush it off, and move on.

5. It’s Tough, but It’s Rewarding

There’s a high turnover in sales. It’s a career that’s filled with stress and pressure. It’s a career that can be frustrating and demoralizing. And it can be really hard to make sales, especially in the beginning when you haven’t yet refined your sales strategy and created a repeatable sales process.

However, senior sales people have been there, too. And they know it’s tough. But now that they’re at the top, they also know how rewarding it can be to keep pushing through and trying until they achieve the success that they seek.