You will lose sales.
Get over it.
The best salespeople who ever lived lost sales. Babe Ruth struck out, and so will you.
Stay focused on the volume and quality of your opportunities. Or, in baseball parlance, quality at-bats.
Feed the top of your pipeline, and qualify well. Do those things, and you’ll have plenty of happy customers --- singles and home runs --- over time.
P.S. The same holds true for those of you responsible for named accounts. You won’t have hundreds of those, but within each account, don’t get hung up on one individual. Broaden the breadth and depth of your relationships within the account.
I remember being focused on signing a key reseller in the legal industry. There were only a handful of resellers in that vertical with the kind of installed customer base that could transform our sales velocity. We simply had to sign them.
The challenge was that their key decisionmaker seemed less than interested. Even after I tracked him down at an event and introduced myself in person, he was very skeptical about partnering with us.
He agreed to give us a hearing, so we scheduled a phone conference that would be attended by at least a dozen of his consultants. At the start of that meeting, he expressed his tentative decision: no sale!
Fortunately, during the seven months prior to this conference, we’d slowly built up a base of fans among the consultants. I’d met some in person. Some had tried our product. Many had asked their customers about us.
When the consultants around the room heard “no sale” they sprung into action, eagerly talking about how this was in fact the right product at the right time for their customer base. Twenty minutes later, the principal had come around, and we had a new partner.
Volume is your friend.
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