The rep who kept dialing through 48 rejections won today. Talent is overrated in sales. I have watched gifted reps get outworked by people who were just willing to dial every day. Through the bad calls and the weeks where nothing lands. A lot of people quit cold calling right when it starts to click. One rough patch and they decide it does not work. The ones who stay on the phone stop sounding nervous and build a feel for it you only get from reps. I know it is the most boring advice in sales, but it bears repeating- Just keep showing up.
Damn I want that six pack though
Persistence isn't the alternative to skill, it's literally how skill gets built. You can't know which version of your pitch survives real objections until you've said it wrong forty times first.
Talent might get you started. But consistency keeps you in the game long enough to become dangerous. The difficult part is not making calls when the pipeline is moving and confidence is high. It is picking the phone up on the quieter days, following up when nobody replies, and keeping your standards when there is no immediate reward or nobody is watching. That is where most people fail. And that is usually where the gap starts to open, if you don’t work for it you’ll never win. Been saying this to sales teams for years, just take a shot, make the call. What’s the worst that could happen. Raise the standard.
So true. I realized something earlier in my career: there are two types of successful people when it comes to cold calling, 1. The ones who are really talented and 2. The ones that just don't quit and push harder. I would almost always bet on the ones that don't quit. Even if they didn't have the natural talent. Because you can always teach tactics, but it's near impossible to teach drive and resilience.
Here's is something that worked for me as a manager. When I had a new starter, I would always "salt" the call list so there were at least a couple of low hanging fruit in the first 20-30 calls ensuring a couple of sales. Amazing how if you set a person up with the right experience up front how that frames their willingness to "hang in there" and keep dialing knowing there is a sale in there somewhere - you just need to persist. They also go into the call with a positive approach rather than an expectation of a rejection. For every NO you are closer to a YES
The reminder we all need sometimes (weekly)
LOve this post. And what a great GIF! I was helping scale a YouTube Growth Agency and was overseeing ~10 sales reps doing around 800 outbound calls/day and were unsuccessful in getting conversations to book calls and close sales. As a sales director, I needed to get in the trenches and see if I could help lead the way. So I took a Saturday morning. In 45 minutes, I dialled 10 ice cold leads in the real estate space which, of which 7 people picked up, and I was able to book 5 of those 7 calls, which was shocking to me. I was able to book five calls within 45 minutes. I wasn't even sure if I'd be getting anybody to pickup on a Saturday morning let alone book even 1 call within the hour. I think part of the sales success that I can share is being able to give a pattern interrupt in the first three seconds, capture their attention in the next eight seconds, and hold a conversation for about 90 seconds to book that call. Who knows? Maybe I got lucky. LOL :P What are some of your best practices? Share below in the comments so I can learn from you Sales Savages!
This is the kind of advice that sounds boring but holds up
David Chevalier persistence is one of the most underrated skills in sales. Consistency often builds confidence in ways that talent alone can't. In commission-only sales, showing up every day matters because each conversation is another opportunity to learn, refine your approach, and create future business. For the sales professionals here: sustainable success usually comes from disciplined habits repeated over time.
48 rejections and one yes works fine in the US. Try it in Germany. There the buyer doesn't reject you, he just loops in four colleagues and disappears for a quarter. Dialing harder won't fix a buying committee.