Persistence Past Seven Nos

"When the guy saw me, he was understandably grumpy. ‘What are you doing back here? I’ve already told you to bugger off,’ he barked at me, before turning his back and returning to what he was doing. I had no commercial nous, but I thought back to that photocopied and crumpled ‘15 ways’ sheet. Dumb and desperate, I reached for every tool in the toolkit and tried them all, and with no sophistication in sight. There was the ‘Ben Franklin close’, where you list out the pros and cons for your prospect. There was the ‘puppy dog close’ that car dealers try with their offer to take the vehicle away and bring it back on Monday, by which time you’re attached and want to keep it. There was the ‘assumptive close’ (‘How would you like to pay?’). There was the ‘choice close’ (‘Would you like the ad to run this weekend or next?’). I blindly and blithely tried them all. Barry had said that the best salespeople ask for an order seven times before they give up – yet I feel like I was met with many more painstaking rebuffs than that on this torturous afternoon. But still, I kept getting back up. I even tried a transparently weak empathy close – with the age-old ‘feel, felt, found’ trifecta: ‘I know how you feel. Just last month I was talking to your opposition, and they felt the same way. But after they ran an ad, they found their sales increased by 10 percent …’"

"what was even more valuable was what I had learnt that day: I had learnt to hang in there. That if I wanted to be good at something, or even simply succeed at it, I couldn’t give up. I’d learnt that persistence pays off and that I could get a positive outcome. I’ll admit that the idea of not giving up was hardly a lesson that I hadn’t heard before. The virtues of ‘not giving up’ are virtually baked into the advice we receive as we grow – whether that be while we’re trying to master a new skill, learn a sport, or make our way through a particularly curly maths problem. As with much of the well-meaning lessons we get as we grow, though, it’s a lot easier to say – and to know – than it is to do. What I learnt that day, at Barry’s insistence, was the very large helping of gumption it takes to actually keep going. It is far, far easier to give up. Especially when persisting feels so uncomfortable. Yet here I was able to see the seeds of the success that was possible if I stuck it out. Being able to walk into a place, meet with someone who I hadn’t known previously, and walk back out with $1,000 of their money and a signed contract was a useful skill to have, I recognised. And my eyes were beginning to open to a new sense of possibility. I often say that I hadn’t really done anything useful until I started work – that my story of success starts there and that everything before it felt fairly mundane and boring. This is why. It’s where I started to see a whole new world. And I couldn’t help but wonder: What else might be possible if only I could hang in there? How else might I be able to succeed if I truly didn’t give up?"

"Then I saw an ad for the job at Xerox. It was a sales rep role, paying twice what the other jobs I’d been applying for had. And there was a company car included. Bingo. I set my sights on getting the role, interviewing first with a hard-edged guy called Harry Morgan, who strung me along for weeks. I would ring him and ring him – keen to demonstrate my persistence – but it got to the point of me harassing him. He told me that if I kept ringing, I wouldn’t get the job. But with my experience with Marine Services and what I’d learnt from Barry still fresh in my mind, I kept asking anyway."