Persistence is (Still) Key
Startup Advisor & GTM Consultant Hanna Larsson recently shared a LinkedIn post that caught my attention with its first few lines — because having been in sales from ‘97-’02, I knew what was coming next before I expanded it to see the rest.
Seeing the long line of repeated Nos immediately took me back to my six years in almost-straight-commission sales, the first year selling Motorolla and Samsung pagers (AKA beepers) and both Motorolla and NEC phones — and the next five years learning how to design effective integrated security systems and provide security and risk-mitigation consulting to C-level leadership dealing with completely new threats across a broad spectrum of industries.
As both the telecoms and security realms were seeing major upheaval from new mindblowing technological advances, the public were naturally still reluctant to leave a comfort zone that they had known for many previous decades.
As a result, LISTENING and asking the right questions was the most important factor of my ability to pay the bills in those days. After that came persistence.
Persistence — This is the Way
When I was in B2B Sales for ADT/tyco Security years ago, my average was 40 calls to get a “yes” to a meeting with a C-level decisionmaker. Having that number as a starting point enables everything else. If you don’t know this number for yourself in whatever industry you are in, you won’t be able to do your job with any degree of success.
Each day I reserved half that day for making calls (this was before email had caught on), with the other half day for driving to various appointments that I’d set. My daily target (for half a day) was minimum 40 calls (i.e. minimum 1 yes), to give me a rolling minimum of 1 scheduled visit per day for new business, with several unscheduled stops to existing customers.
The far more effective method to achieve a yes result was asking, “Do you have any friends or peers facing similar challenges, who might also benefit from this solution?” My ratio on referrals was waaaaay better than 40:1 for getting them to agree to a meeting, probably more like 10:1.
When you have something like that working, you hand over to the newbies any inbound leads coming from the Marketing team — not because they are a waste of time, but because they typically bring less revenue (and higher chance of chargebacks) than referrals.
Persistence — Even with Yourself
Noise (or rather, noise pollution). What were my odds that you even clicked to read this? Pretty small. And it sat in my ‘Drafts’ folder for a whole month, simply because I too am distracted by 100,000 other things. But when I found it again just now, I told myself to just get it done — without being a perfectionist (being human beats perfectionism every time).
Sometimes I signoff my emails with ‘Carpe diem’, which serves as both a note to self and a message to its reader. Whatever it takes for you to be persistent with your aims, get it done.
Carpe diem,
Jason
