This week’s Words goes out to all of you struggling to find your way in a career in sales. As you grind through the daily ritual of cold-calling and even colder emails, do you catch yourself asking things like, “Why am I doing this?” Do you lose confidence in your abilities and start to think that you don’t have the skills to close the deal even if you could get someone to answer one of your calls?
Whenever I find myself in this frame of mind my go-to line is: “It only takes one.”
The story that I like to tell to demonstrate this principle is a personal one. Several years into my own career in sales, I was finally making a decent living. True, it was mostly from grit and cold calls, but it was a living. I kept to the small clients, reasoning that I didn’t stand a chance with any of the bigger groups. Finally, after one particularly frustrating day desperately trying to scrape up some business, it occurred to me that it would only take one big deal to change my whole year.
From that day forward, whenever I ran into the inevitable wall of frustration I would remind myself that it only takes one, and then I would make some crazy cold-calls to the really big tenants. After calling one large company every day for six months, I finally got a break. One afternoon my call somehow went straight through to the decision-maker. He asked me what I was calling about, and after freezing for a moment at the shock of actually reaching someone I blurted out, “Commercial real estate!” He paused for a moment and then said, “Son, today is your lucky day.”
Come to find out, he had just had a big fight with his landlord and was determined to move out as soon as possible. Could I come out and see him the next afternoon to discuss some possibilities for moving his entire operation? Naturally, my schedule was suddenly wide open. The next day I set out for the meeting. As fate would have it, my old clunker of a car died about a mile from my appointment. Sitting there on the side of the road, I knew I couldn’t blow this opportunity. So even though it was August in D.C., and I was in full suit and tie, I decided to walk the rest of the way.
By the time I finally reached the meeting site, I was sweating through my suit like Hal Brooks in Broadcast News. Lucky for me my new client had a good sense of humor. He also was very knowledgeable about what he was looking for in a new space and where he wanted to be. In the end, it turned into a 278,000 sf build-to-suit industrial deal that was the largest transaction of its type in the state of Maryland that year. It was hands-down the biggest deal of my career at that time.
So the next time you are frustrated and nearing the breaking point remind yourself that it only takes one. Take some of the big shots that you think you have no chance making – I’m living proof that sometimes the biggest deals come out of nowhere and change everything.
Have a great weekend,
Ro