It’s commonly discussed amongst salespeople that it’s good to be a little impatient. It’s good to be assertive and pushy to get deals done—not just sit back and wait for things to happen.
However, in this marketplace, you actually have to be a little patient with your customers because they have a lot going on. If you act with too much impatience and push them too hard, it looks self-serving and shows you don’t care about them and their organization. This will cost you the sale.
The Best Way Pushy Salespeople Can Be Patient
As salespeople, the best way for us to be patient is to control the things we can control and to be patient about the things we can’t. What can’t we control? We can’t always control their budgeting process. We can’t control their operational decisions. And we can’t control the pace in which they need to make decisions based on everything that’s going on.
However, more importantly, we can control the size of our pipeline, the number of leads that we bring in, and the number of people that we engage inside the organization. Those three things allow us to be patient because the more deals we have in the pipeline, the more we can wait for some to take their time because we always have something else to close.
The more leads we have outside the pipeline, the more patient we can be because there’s always somebody else to nurture and create a new opportunity. The more people we’re engaging inside every opportunity, the more patient we can be because we always have somebody to talk to who’s telling us what’s going on. We haven’t arbitrarily created a gatekeeper or created a situation where they’re ghosting us because they’re too busy doing other things.
So, be patient this year. Stand out from the rest of the aggressive, reactive, and tactical salespeople. Allow your customers some space by controlling what you can so you don’t get stressed out about trying to control what you can’t.
