To fellow salespeople,
It gets quiet and lonely in the submarine when you're pinging out into the ocean for treasure.
Sales is many no's, some yes's, and even more silence, where sometimes the only feedback you're getting back is the echo of your own messaging on trench walls. The hardest part of sales is the silence in between pings: calls, emails, meetings. The more type A, or high D you are, the more anxiety you have about delays. As a high D and all that goes with it, I like actions and outcomes, a clear "yes!", a clear "no!", or "let's keep talking," to which I follow-up with "when?" to get a "yes" on an agreed plan of action. (Asking a customer to give you one of three answers is a known limiter to the nuances of human interaction, so I'll take suggestions on how expand possible outcomes.)
I've heard good advice: "If someone doesn't get back to you, assume they have perfectly good reasons." I think about my own life: a car needs repair, you get sick, you have a day-long customer meeting, a day-long sales meeting, a half-day training, vacation, a customer fire drill; things just get pushed. Add to a normal stack of time demands a micro-manager boss directing and redirecting your time or your initiatives, or kids at home (I have neither), and my empathy for people instantly triples. Delays in response should be expected; silence is normal.
And yet, that crummy little inner voice creates a one-sided dialogue in that silence between pings. It starts by asking: “ What’s the customer thinking about this next step? Are they thinking at about it at all?” Then the voice chirps with indignant accusations like: “It's not fair! I get judged on my response time, but I can’t get a reply when I need it." And then self-doubt: “Did I bug them too much? Did I not follow-up enough? Did a competitor blow away my price? Did the budget get slashed? Did they pivot to another project? Does my advocate still work there? Did I provide enough value? Is my customer relationship strong enough? Does my customer trust me?"
Crush this inner dialogue like a submarine beyond its depth with these two strategies: 1) Trust that your anxiety, your feel of failing, as evidenced by this inner-dialogue, drives the right behaviors. 2) Trust that the right behaviors, the correct actions you take as a result of this dialogue, will be enough, in so far as you can affect the outcome. As an earnest, but rather poor student of Stoic philosophy, I try to live by one its principles: “Think about only those things to which you can directly or indirectly affect the outcome, act to affect the outcome, and don’t second-guess your actions afterwards.”
What’s the hardest part of sales for you, and how do you solve for it?