Welcome to issue 83! Did someone forward this to you? If so, Subscribe here!
⚡ Today’s Skill In A Sentence ⚡
Confidence knows to wait while insecurity always has something to say.
Today’s Skill: Patience
It’s been 5 months since I left my 15-year software sales career to be a fractional sales leader and coach for early-stage start-ups.
And the same difference I kept noticing between the top performing sales reps and their less successful peers is the same difference between founders who are closing deals and those that continue to struggle.
A lot of it isn’t in the things we do or say.
It’s actually in the things we don’t.
And it’s so glaring to see it once you know what to look for.
Patience vs Impatience
I continue to champion the thought that patience is one of the most underutilized skills in sales.
Because patience resembles confidence, empathy and long-term thinking.
Which means that impatience resembles lack of confidence, selfishness and short-term wins.
Here’s how it shows up in the sales cycle?
Discovery
Patience - Making the entire call about understanding their problems and the impact it has on their business.
Impatience - Talking about yourself and what you do 12 minutes into a first call.
Unresponsive Buyers
Patience - Letting an email sit for 2 weeks before responding again.
Impatience - Replying to an email after 3 days of it being unanswered.
Urgency
Patience - Accepting a buyers timeline and building a plan around it.
Impatience - Forcing a decision to start now despite what they might have just shared with you.
Pricing
Patience - Setting up a separate call to discuss the pricing and partnership in depth.
Impatience - Dumping all your pricing at the end of a call
Objections
Patience - Acknowledging and asking for more insight to understand their question or concern.
Impatience - Responding by over-explaining a reason that defends or deflects.
Discounting
Patience - Setting up additional calls to reestablish value.
Impatience - Giving a discount after any price objection.
Decision-making
Patience - Creating a meeting where other members of their team can get involved to ask more questions and confirm the fit.
Impatience - Lobbing over a proposal after one call in order to get to a decision faster.
→ Patience is being proactive.
→ Impatience is being reactive.
Be real with yourself on which person shows up in most of your sales interactions.
That awareness alone will do wonders for shifting your perspective and your approach.
And that is how skills start to become sticky.
Final Thoughts
I know everyone wants the silver-bullet tactic or script to selling better.
It doesn’t exist. It never has.
But that’s why creating systems build a foundation to your sales process and building skills on top of those help you, be you, more often.
And patience is one of the most important skills you can leverage.
It puts the buyer first and creates a long-term “partnership” view versus a short-term “I need to win this deal now” one.
And, funny enough, when you use patience, deals actually close faster and more often.
Action Item
Take 5 minutes with the tech put away and think about your active deals from the last week. Where did impatience show up?
Was it on a call? Was it in an email?
Write it down so you can see it.
Then, write below it how you could have approached it differently.
Send me what you came up with if you’d me to review it. I read every reply.
Need more help? Here’s how I can step in to assist.
Need to get a quick W? Let me roast one of your sales calls so you can get immediate & actionable feedback to use on your very next call → Get Roasted Now
Want to build a repeatable sales foundation? Let’s see if the 90-day Sales Accelerator is right for you → Grab time to chat here
That’s all for today! If you wanted to say hello, reply to this email or catch me over on Linkedin
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until next week!
just get started,
Brian
