Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Great Salespeople Find a Way

I once heard a motivational speaker share the most common excuses he hears from salespeople about their lack of success. His routine followed the days of the week and started like this: You can never sell on Monday, people are just getting back to work, and they don’t want to be bothered with talking to a salesperson. They will get aggravated if you try to reach them on Monday.

Don’t ever try to sell on Tuesday because that’s the day they claim most companies have their operations meetings, and they’re too busy with meetings to meet with outsiders.

Wednesday is not a bad day to sell but be careful since every salesperson knows this and is also trying to see potential customers on the same day. The lobbies are too full.

Thursday is not a bad day but go early, especially during certain times of the year as buyers will leave early to start the weekend.

Certainly, Friday is a terrible day to talk to a business as everyone is in the weekend mode. So, don’t even bother.

That leaves just the small window of maybe Wednesday and a little bit on Thursday. No kidding.

Of course, the audience laughed at the absurdity of this. However, I noticed the laughing soon got a little hollow and then stopped altogether as the audience realized they had often used these same “rules for inactivity.”

We can always find reasons not to do something. Working with salespeople for the past 20 years, I have heard just about every reason for why they cannot go out and sell.

Here are a few of my personal favorites followed by my response:

I don’t sell on Friday; that’s the day I do my paperwork. What paperwork? Your expense report? That weekly status report that you’re supposed to be working on every day of the week?

I can’t get out and sell because I have to stay in the factory to make sure my products are built correctly. If I leave, they will not do it right. Remember, your job is sales, not operations.

The website is terrible. I will need to help upgrade the site before I start calling on customers. This is popular with salespeople right after they join a company. Substitute website for literature, handout, social media, trade booth, business cards, or whatever other marketing materials that the salesperson does not deem adequate for him or her to get out and sell right now. It’s all the same excuse.

So, we get it. You don’t really want to go out and sell, do you? You like having the title and the cachet it gives you. But the actual doing part of sales? Well, not so much.

The funny thing is that the really successful salespeople don’t care a whit about this stuff. They never ever utter excuses. They go out and sell. They find a way.

In fact, the really great salespeople will use their weaker competitors’ excuses as steps of a ladder to their own success. A great salesperson will look at the fact that others do not want to call on customers Mondays and Fridays to succeed by actually calling customers on those specific days, knowing that their competitors will be safely ensconced in their home factories, watching to make sure that their product is built correctly, and driving their operations people crazy with their interference.

I’ll say it again, salespeople are supposed to sell. They are supposed to get in touch with people they don’t know and convince them to buy something they don’t yet want. The salesperson’s job is to make sure that they will be convincing enough, and do their job well enough, to get to know their customers better, to change their minds, so they will buy what they did not think they wanted.

They are not supposed to stand around, wringing their hands because they cannot visit customers due to COVID. They are supposed to find a way to work with that.

They are not supposed to sit around, drinking their fourth cup of coffee of the morning, talking to other salespeople, commiserating about those “darn millennials who don’t want to see them and so they can’t make a sale.”

Just to aggravate the heck out of these folks, I will bring up the story of H. Ross Perot, whose first job was in sales for IBM, and who was so good and innovative at what he did that he made and then surpassed his annual quota by the end of the first month.

Sometimes I’m not sure why I bother, though, because as soon as I finish telling my story, the excuses come flying at me like rotten tomatoes slung at a bad actor:

Things are different now.

He didn’t have millennials to deal with.

He had a great product to sell.

IBM sold itself.

I don’t buy it. I just point out that old Ross would have found a way. Because great salespeople always find a way.

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.