Embrace the Struggle
If you’re in a place where you’re frustrated by your lack of wins, you’re going to want to look for shortcuts, silver bullets, and excuses. None of these are going to help you over the long term.
The fact is, sales success is difficult to achieve. But there’s a lot of satisfaction in learning to accomplish things that have a high degree of difficulty. Success in sales is a lot more than awards and nice commission checks. It’s the knowledge that you understand people, connect with them, and solve problems. It’s knowing you’re able to analyze situations and appreciate the nuance that goes into each one because not all such problems have the same solutions. It comes with the acquired wisdom of not only the multiple problems solved over the years but also the confidence of knowing that you’ve been in the woods before and have not only made it out alive but stronger and wiser.
In many ways, sales is a metaphor for life. It’s about people encountering unfamiliar situations, being uncomfortable or conflicted in some way, learning the skills and the tools to work through it, and coming out the other side better for it. I believe we're here to learn those lessons.
If the struggle is the point, then it makes much more sense to embrace it rather than throw your arms up in the air and run from it. It makes a lot more sense to revisit your process and find out why your wins haven’t happened yet. Understand that if you’re doing the right things, then the results will come. Through this lens, you can identify if you have a selling issue or a patience issue—the two are mutually exclusive.
If you can approach the struggle with curiosity, you can learn from it, and not have the same struggle twice. So you're allowed to challenge newer, bigger, more complicated struggles, with bigger wins. When you go about it this way, you'll notice the wins get larger each time, sometimes exponentially.
There’s no silver bullet that’s going to get you to the next level. As much as selling has a process to it, a career in sales is a process that does not have any shortcuts to it. You need to respect it. You need to be disciplined. You must accept the challenge and dive in. There is no room for excuses.
So where are you right now? Take a look in the mirror. Are you doing what you need to do, and the results just haven’t shown up yet? Or are you really not holding up your end of the bargain and not doing your job? You and only you know the real answers to these questions. Those answers will point you in the right direction.
If you're doing the right things, but haven't seen the payoff yet, keep your head down and your chin up. You're doing what you need to do, and no step is too small if it's headed in the right direction.
If you look in the mirror and realize you're not doing what you need to do, then you've got a discipline issue. There's only one person who can fix that, and they're staring back at you.
Embracing the struggle leads to embracing the work, and when you do that, you win. It's really pretty simple.
Jeff Bajorek
Real. Authentic. Experience.
There’s a big difference between knowing how to sell and being able to. Jeff Bajorek spent over a decade in the field as a top performer. He’s been in your shoes. He knows what it will take. He can help you succeed.
Join the Community
Related Posts
