In sales, the first conversation can feel like a train wreck. You stumble over your words, you say the wrong thing, and you can just feel the prospect slowly disengaging. You already know he’s going to say no. After the first few minutes of back and forth, he asks questions you don’t even know the answer to. While you’re trying to salvage things, you say the wrong thing.
Feeling sweaty, shaky, and tired, but you hope it’s still fine. And then at the end of it, the prospect says, “I’ll think about it.” All of your worst fears are confirmed.
On the way home, you’re thinking to yourself, “That was a horrible experience. Maybe sales just isn’t for me.”
“Maybe I should try something else that’s not sales or do something low key.”
But the ones who make it are the ones who say “no — I’ll stick with this”.
And, “that was horrible, I didn’t like it, but I learned.”
And, “I know what I’m not going to do next time, and I know the questions I didn’t know the answer to. So I’ll figure out what went wrong and do better in front of the next person.”
The next time, you’re still sweating a little. Your voice is still shaking.
But this time you answer the questions well. You think you’re doing much better. And then you hear it again.
“I’ll think about it.”
You don’t know what went wrong. You thought you did everything right.
You smile and say, “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me today. I hope you find what you’re looking for in the future.”
And then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one. This process repeated over and over, hundreds of times, until eventually someone says,
“That actually seems interesting, I think I’d like to explore this further.”
Whether they were really intent beforehand or not, the next step was reached.
And at this point, getting to a ‘yes’ feels natural. Hundreds of failures does that to you, after all, every time the skill improved.
And after that long awaited “yes”, the next level begins. And as the level changes, new problems emerge.
More on that in Part 2 of Overcoming Failure in Sales.
The idea of failing fast and hard in sales is so important. Being able to bounce back quicker is so important in keeping positive with the rejection.
Really inspiring read. Failure is inevitable in sales, but your approach to learning from it is spot on. Keep it up!