Working in sales and being independent has something in common. Both are rollercoasters.
- You get rejected a lot.
- You work odd hours, eg. get up at 3am to have discussions with customers in Asia.
- You work all evening and night to eg. discuss and deliver responses to customers in Latam.
- You, eg., fly half way around the world to meet customers with short notice.
- You work all through the weekend to deliver a solid response to a customer before Monday morning.
- You are always under pressure to deliver a response before an arbitrary deadline.
Being persistent, consistent and and being able to improvise are essential qualities of every sales person, and contrary to common belief, sales is a very tough job where you have to be able to rebound from rejections and stay optimistic.
I have redrawn a graph that I stumbled upon. I can’t remember where, sorry. It is a humorous take on the ups and downs of working in sales – and being independent. I have annotated the graph with a dotted orange line to illustrate a point: it might go up, and down, be great, be horrible, but you have to focus on the long term growth – irrespective of all the “no’s” and rejections, you have to focus on where you want to be and on the end goal.
