Selling is tough

Just a reflection of my leadership life. In the end of the day, individuals, who are truly nurtured in a sense of love, emotion & curiousity, are the top sales performers.

Selling is the hardest job I’ve ever seen. It’s f*cking hard.

If someone told you that: “Selling is easy”, I strongly believe that they’re romantic aliens. In our world, selling is a hard, tough, and easy-to-give-up thing. Let me prove my statement.

I use the words: “Selling Guys” or “We” to include: Salesmen sell their products, HRs recruit talents, Founders find investors, or anyone who sells things.

1. Sales! It’s not a linear game.

Almost all jobs/tasks in our life/work, in the end, have the same formula: In a fixed period of time, We put X resources, and we get Y results. Or if we do it really bad/lazy way, we get 80% of Y, 60% of Y, or 20% of Y. That’s kind of a linear thing.

That’s mostly true when we’re taking an exam at the university, fixing some bugs in our products, doing some paperwork, or designing some graphics.

In contrast, the problem of selling is not a linear thing: In a fixed period of time, we put X resources, we get Y results, and sometimes Zero. If we decide to put 2X resources, no one makes sure that you get 2Y results, almost time is still even Zero.

🙈 The Typical Story:

A salesperson tries to reach out to customers by calling or sending LinkedIn messages, they always expect that every call will convert into a deal/meeting. But they do it again, again and again; and they fail, fail, and fail until the 492th call. What the heck of a 492th call? It means they never know what call will win. That burns them out and kills their emotions, day by day. One day, the selling guys become no-emotion people. They sell without love, compassion, and emotion. As a result, either your revenue will go down because of bad customer experience or you have to regenerate or remake your sales team. It surely costs too much time and resources.

That’s tough. That’s ridiculous. But it’s totally true in real life, at least for selling things.

2. We have “No” answers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

🙈 Another typical Story:

❓“Did you register to have a product demo?” → No, I don’t.

❓“Could we have a meeting to discover your challenges?” → No/Not yet. I’m busy!

❓“Is our tailored solution suitable for your company at this time?” → No, It’s not our priority!

Thousands of “No” answers. Every day, Every minute. We could name a multitude of reasons, which is to receive the customer’s objections, such as Generating bad leads from Marketing, Slow adoption of Product, out of SLAs from supporting department (Legal, Accounting), Bad Demo/Closing, etc. But the guys, who are into the war to fight, to take responsibility, and to suffer a thousand slings and arrows, are selling people as usual, regardless of the different root causes.

Nevertheless, as well-trained salespeople, we are sharpened to become self-ownership warriors. Day by day, we consume every pain we get, heal & recover it, and try to be strong the next days.

Almost all Directors/Managers try to soothe the pain by teaching people to take it as obvious when getting “No” answers.

The problem is that "the pain is never completely recovered. They're still there, like scars. So, how many pains did we take? And how many pains can we endure in the future before we become emotionally numb when selling our things?” ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹

How could we sell a thing without love, emotion, and curiosity? No way.

See you in the next essays of “Winning By Love” series!