The Remarkable Truth About Sales Perseverance

If I think about the most successful sales reps or business owners that I know, the one thing that distinguishes them is their perseverance to succeed.

I know a great sales rep whose continual and unwavering focus on his deals result in high attainment of his sales quota. He has a single-mindedness that is a mixture of discipline and determination when pursuing a sales opportunity. This ensures that he never drops the ball and increases his chances at every step of the sale. If he didn’t have that sheer focus, momentum would drop over time and interest would waiver. Inevitably, the customer wouldn’t get the same degree of support and value from him.

There are some great statistics that highlight the importance of perseverance, although they don’t tell the whole story (we will get to that later…).

According to Marketing Donut:

• 44% of sales people give up after one “no” from a customer
• 22% give up after two “nos”
• 14% give up after three “nos”
• 12% give up after 4 “no”.

Combined with the fact that 80% of prospects say “no” FOUR times before they say yes, Marketing Donut recommends a “Five Nos” strategy — where sales teams continue to stick at it and work through the Five Nos before the customer can be completely qualified out.

Giving up too soon

The most shocking statistic is that 44% of salespeople give up after the first no — when in fact 50% of leads are qualified but the customer isn’t yet ready to buy (according to Hubspot). So the product could be the right fit, the right vendor and the right place — but the time is not right. Your salesperson may have given up by that point, when in fact it was merely a delay to the sales cycle than a true “no”.

Resilience in sales is the ability to keep going every day, taking a knock but not letting it push you off course.

An equation for success

This is all balanced with the ability to qualify the right sales opportunities, which is a skill in itself. There’s no point being uber-resilient and persevering with deals that are a waste of time.

As Angela Duckworth puts it in her book, Grit, “Skill X effort = achievement”.

Without skill, ongoing perseverance is wasted. But likewise, skill alone is not enough to carry people through. We all know talented people who fail to achieve their potential because they haven’t worked away at a focused path.

In sales, resilience is required every day, as in a typical customer firm of between 100–500 employees, there are often 7 people involved in a buying decision. So even if you do get an initial ‘yes’ from the prospect, the road to actually getting paid is fraught with difficulty by the sheer fact of having to get 7 people on your side to move a sale along.

With telesales agents, it can take 8 attempts to reach a cold calling prospect and takes on average 6.25 hours of prospecting to set 1 appointment. Adding in lunch, a few breaks and checking email, that’s one appointment per day if all you did was prospect, prospect, prospect without interruption. Think about how much time you or your sales reps actually spend prospecting, and you can see why some reps fail to fill up their calendar with appointments. (If you were visiting a customer every day you would be left with little time to prospect to fill up the next week’s calendar).

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “”Energy and persistence conquer all things.” Yet there is evidence that top performers don’t just “do more” than the average person. The truth is, predictably, more complex.

Swimming towards a sale

In research about how Olympic swimmers come to be top of their game, researchers found that achieving excellence is more down to qualitative changes rather than quantitative changes. In simple terms, ‘doing more’ of the same thing doesn’t necessarily produce better results. Making changes to how you do things is what results in the change. We obviously have to persevere and show continued resilience, but changes to how we approach and deliver our work makes more difference.

An example of this in the Olympic swimmers’ context is that the most successful swimmers showed up on time to practice every day. They developed discipline and resilience in their practicing. But they didn’t just train for many more hours than average swimmers, they changed their technique or looked at how they could make small improvements to different areas of their swimming practice. The changes were qualitative in nature.

Three qualitative changes that differentiated these swimmers from other swimmers were:

• Technique: improving technique, focusing on form and processes.
• Discipline: applying discipline and standards to what they did and how they did things.
• Attitude: they altered their attitude to improve their performance. Researchers found that the activities hated by lower level swimmers were actually enjoyed by Olympic swimmers. They saw these activities as positives, and reframed them in their minds to be something to embrace rather than avoid. Think about how if you suddenly found you relished cold calling, do you think you would make more calls and consequently generate more leads?

Another incredible point from the study was that most of the Olympic champions appeared to have overcome some form of adversity on their journey to success. That’s not to say that to succeed your life history must be filled with struggles, but more that one of the most important factors in reaching success is the ability to overcome the stumbling blocks along the way. After all, if people stop on their journey at the first hurdle, then it’s 100% guaranteed they won’t reach the end. But if you keep going, it’s 100% guaranteed that you will finish what you set out on. You can guarantee success, but you can guarantee the actions that you are going to take that could help you to reach that success.

Backing off from the competition

A quote from Nietzche that is highlighted in that study is that to ‘call someone divine, means “here we do not have to compete”. This, in effect, suggests that when we say a ‘sales rep is born’ or ‘he’s a natural salesperson’, we are protecting our own ego and effort by putting someone in a different, unobtainable category to yourself. This is a category that is impossible to achieve, so why both trying in the first place? If we actually said, “He’s such a great salesperson, he has worked hard to be as good as he is now and he follows a set approach to his work that has served him well so far”, then we might feel like our ego has been dented; as that level of success appears obtainable for all — if only we had the same perseverance and tried his same formula for achievement. It is far easier to avoid the effort and instead believe that sales success is something we cannot change, improve or obtain. Rather than change our own behaviours, we prefer to continue doing what we have been doing, look on in awe (and maybe envy) at those achieving and wonder why we aren’t in the same position.

If there’s one thing I recommend it is to embrace perseverance, whether that’s in a customer deal or across your entire career.