[E83] Q&A Week: What do you wish you knew before getting into sales?

With any job there are great things and challenges. Sometimes those challenges can drive you crazy.

This question is usually asked by people thinking about getting into sales (or just started and maybe still in training) …“What is something about being a sales representative which if people had known from the beginning, many of them would have never entered the profession?”

Of course, everyone is different – so what one person sees as a negative in sales is different than what other people might be unhappy about.

But there is one thing that most everyone can agree on should be near the top of the list.

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Episode 83 – Transcript

Hi and welcome to episode 83 of the sales experience podcast. So glad that you’re here.

So thankful that you are listening to this. Again, this may be your first time listening. Maybe you’ve listened to other shows in the past, maybe you’re one of the subscribers, you’ve left ratings, reviews, whatever.

It is so appreciative, so thankful that you’re here because I take that as a sign that a, I’m having some kind of impact, but B, you want to change the way that sales has done and also the way that sales is viewed by prospects, by the world, by customers who have the negative impression on sales now and we all can change that over time so that it’s a positive instead of a negative.

It’s something that prospects look forward to. They look forward to dealing with a sales professional because they know that that person is going to solve their issue, help them achieve a goal, get them to a better place, get them to a different place, whatever that is, they know that the professional salesperson will help them for today.

I’m going to go into another question. This one comes at me online. It’s what is something about being a sales representative, which if people had known from the beginning, many of them would not have entered the profession of sales.

Now this is generally what somebody who’s new going into sales or is not in sales at all and it’s just wondering like if you had known it from the beginning, would you have not entered sales? And obviously that can be asked of any profession. If you had known x, Y, and z about being a doctor, would you have not gone into sales? Like would have pushed you over the edge if you had known in advance.

Now of course everybody is different so everyone has a different perspective of what they like or don’t like in sales or what they wish they had known because then they would never have entered it.

But I’ll tell you, just taking a stab at it. The biggest fundamental thing I have seen is that most people don’t fully understand the large volume of rejection, the pure amount of times that you’re going to be told. No, just massive amount of times that people will say, you know, they’re not interested right now. They don’t want it. It doesn’t make sense.

The massive amount of people who will tell you to follow up or won’t buy now and you have the impression that you should follow up and call them later on and they never answer. They ghost you. They don’t respond to the emails. Maybe at some point later they tell you they’re not interested, they don’t want to buy it.

You know? And then there’s the in your face, rejection and confrontation that comes from people asking questions, battling, pushing back. I think all of the confrontational like objections and responses, that’s just a part of sales.

That’s a part of being able to handle what it is that you’re selling and being able to respond. But I think the rejection that getting, no, the talking to 10 prospects and five of them don’t buy, eight of them don’t buy, you know, 10 of them don’t buy, depending if you’re having a really bad day or week, wherever you’re at, maybe you’re new.

But that amount of rejection, that amount of purely not winning can be so tough if we look at as sports, right? So let’s take baseball. If you’re gonna play baseball and you’re going to get up to the bag and get pitches thrown to you and you’re going to miss or strike out, how many times are you going to strike out without ever hitting the ball before just wanting to give up and quit.

If you get one hit maybe and then you get tagged out at first or you get one hit and you get on, but that happens once a game, once every other game.

How often are you going to do that before you want to quit? Or how much effort are you gonna put into improving your game so that you can get better?

So you can get on more. But fundamentally, and here’s the hardest part I have with sales and have always had with it, is if we look at the baseball analogy, if you want to be in the hall of fame for baseball, you’ve got to have like a 0.33 batting average.

If you have that, you’re an all-star you’re in the hall of fame, that means that you get on base essentially one out of every three at bats. I mean two out of three you’re striking out, you’re hitting a pop flyer, getting tagged out, something negative is happening. That means you’re successful one out of three times in sales, sometimes in bigger ticket sales or in certain environments, you’ve actually got to close better than that.

You’ve got to close at 50% maybe 80% whatever that might be for you. And so that can be tough. Or when you’ve got somebody on the hook and you’re moving them forward in the process and if anything sideways happens, then that’s going to be a giant failure. So sometimes account management needs to be 100% sales needs to be 2030 40% and that’s rough.

That’s hall of fame level just to survive, just to be in sales, just to win. But that also means there’s a lot of losing going on every day, every week, every month, every year when you’re in sales. And that can be tough.

I won’t say it takes a special person, but it takes getting to a special place in your life mentally with your mind set to go into a sales career, into a sales role, knowing that if you’re on fire, you’re going to lose more than you’re gonna win based on the conversations you’re having because you’re not going to hit 100% you’re not going to close 100% of the people, nor should you.

And that means there’s going to be a lot of people we’re going to tell you know a lot of people who are going to ghost you. Even if you’re just successful, you’re crushing it. You’re just doing amazing and sales. You’re going to be winning a portion of the time and losing probably a larger portion of the time because that’s just how it goes.

It’s just a game of numbers and at bats and giving it all you’ve got, and I know that that’s one of the hardest things for people, especially when they hit a slump. If you hit a slump and sales and you’re going, Oh, for 10 over 20 you haven’t closed a deal in a while, that gets in your head. Can you just think about, man, I wish I could go do something else. That was easier where I could show up every day and I’m just winning.

I’ll tell you from experience, I’ve been in sales for so long, she’s been several days, several times in my life where I’m like, man, I thought about going and working at a grocery store instead because literally just show up. You help people all day.

You’re not judged on it. It’s not a feeling of winning and losing. You’re just literally helping people, checking people out or bagging groceries, whatever. Sometimes I’ve seen the garbage man driving by and I think, man, I’ll, you know, maybe that would be a simpler life. That’s a much easier life driving around, picking up garbage because you know you’re not being judged.

Your whole mental mind set isn’t around winning and losing. It’s just about doing this task and I know a lot of sales people who hit that wall. A lot of people who struggle in the beginning because they think they should do well.

Maybe they have been good at other things in their life. They show up brand new in a sales role and, it’s tough. There’s a lot of rejection. So if that’s you, if you’re thinking about getting into sales or maybe you’re in sales and you struggle with this, make sure to always be working on your mind set.

The first thing is with sales, set the right expectation in your mind. Have your manager talk to you about that and help you with what you should be expecting. What would be a good closing percentage?

Is it 20% 30% 40% and set that in your mind and not worry about the 70% as long as you’re hitting your 30% and you’re always trying to improve, that’s the first thing. Make sure you have the right mental expectations. Some people go into sales expecting a hundred percent which is just ludicrous.

It’s never going to happen. And so they get really upset and really sensitive every time. They don’t close a deal when that’s not really a fair expectation. So the first part is get the right expectations set mentally on your side and work on your mind set.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a week of podcasts about sales success mind set. Listened to those episodes because that’s really important. I’m not going to recap it now, but in those I covered how to work on your mind set specifically in sales and what to do and help overcome that, which ties into this.

That’s it for this episode. Make sure to subscribe everywhere. It’s everywhere that you can find the Podcast, Stitcher, Sound cloud, iTunes, Spotify, Google play podcast. It’s on the cutter consulting group.com website.

Always, remember that everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.