Why is sales so hard

In many professions, stable or incremental performance is all that is expected for a given role. In sales, sales people are constantly expected to do better in every metric that can be tracked and measured because sales goals are always fluid, moving targets.

Those who lament that this is one reason why sales is so hard can come to terms by realizing:. The close is the key when it comes to sales. An individual might be great at making cold calls, giving presentations, and performing other sales support activities, but if he or she can not close he or she will not be a successful sales person.

Sales is so hard to master in these conditions, yet it is integral to building a sales career. Where do I sign? If the close is approached too early, too late, or never, the sale will not happen. Make sales less difficult by knowing when to close:. Taking personal responsibility for results is not easy and is part of what makes it true that sales is so hard, but sales people must accept these conditions every day. Which company are you? Are you the one making up things about sales, or the one doing things the optimal way?

If you have been relatively flat year over year, you know the answer. Toggle navigation Search. A typical sales person might say the following things on any given day: I get rejection all the time.

I lose deals to the competition all the time, even when we are logically the better solution. Prospects lie to me all of the time. In fact it has become so easy to predict sales success just by isolating prospecting activity. The sales people only prospect people who are likely to have problems that their product or service will solve.

This reduces the amount of noes that they actually get, and increases the amount of people that want to talk to them to see if they can be helped.

I made contact with one prospect who hadn't got back to us in two years and took him through the sales process. It ended up being a very high dollar opportunity for our company, and I was excited about it. But then, of course, he went completely cold again. I followed up every week or two for six months, re-wording the same email and voice message offering my assistance.

Eventually, he hired an assistant who took over the project of buying our product and it purchased it within one month. It's not like he wasn't getting back to me because he didn't want to buy. He knew he needed our product but didn't have time to deal with it.

I put the purchase order on my wall and wrote down how many times I followed up on it as a reminder to myself to grind through all of these follow-ups. The hard part is that I'm following up with so many people simultaneously. I probably dedicate half of my working time to efficiently and thoughtfully following up with people. It takes a ton of brain power, writing, speaking, thinking, and is very taxing.

I would even consider it a 'follow-up muscle' that you build over time. The failure is that many salespeople simply stop following up.

They only stay on the hot opportunities that are getting back to them quickly. I never stop following up until I get a definitive 'No, I do not want to buy your product because of X reason.