The Communications Nuts & Bolts Of Building A Successful Business: 4: The Baseball Metaphor As It Applies To Sales

This is actually where the rubber meets the road, or in the case of the sustained metaphor below, where the bat meets the ball.

A long time ago now I learned that no matter what title you give yourself in your business, you are always the difacto manager of sales. And as such you are always in the position of having to deal with more failure than success.

A lot of the people who start their own businesses and then end up packing it in and finding employment somewhere will often point to their inability to deal with rejection as the main reason for their giving up.

And that ability, the ability carry on and execute your game plan, regardless of how many slammed doors and thanks-but-no-thanks you encounter along the way, is one of the most important keys to success.

Because even if you are doing everything else well. If you have a good product or service, if you have a solid brand and a well-defined marketing program, you can literally find yourself out of the game

without the patience and perseverance that comes from understanding the fundamentals of good selling.

The Baseball Metaphor

The best advice about the selling business I ever got was from a gentleman named Terry O'Malley, who was the Creative Director (and part owner) of Vickers & Benson, the first real big time agency I ever worked at.

Terry was a total jock and very heavily involved in the sports business. And as such, he always made the metaphorical comparison between advertising and baseball and I think it's a good one. And I also think ing applies to all aspects of selling, because, let’s face it, advertising is really just selling without all the trudging around.

Here’s how it more or less it went.

First of all. it’s just a head game. There’s competition out there but it’s not really as important as the battle that rages inside your head, which is where a game like baseball is mainly played. You can defeat yourself as easily as you can get defeated by your competitors. It's all about the psych.

Failure is part of the game. A major league player who hits .300 is an all star. So shoot for that and don’t worry about the .700 that you can’t achieve…just learn from your outs.

Accept that you’re not gonna hit a home run every time up to the plate. The main objective is to get on base and be in a position to score. Not every prospect is gonna do the right thing. Not every prospect can really be convinced that you and your stuff are the be all and end all. But you just have to keep on swinging.

Study the stats. Do not be shy about listening to other points of view on selling. What you are reading here is one point of view. But I have worked for some incredible sales gurus over the years, who have different approaches. The more you know about the various techniques of sales the easier it will be to fashion the approach what works best for you and the kinds of prospects you have to deal with.

The work you do is the ball. It gets batted around a lot. Sometimes it goes into left field. Sometimes it’s caught. Sometimes it goes foul and sometimes it goes over the fence. But that doesn’t matter because any sales program is a constant work in progress. The ball is always going somewhere and you can’t always control where.

If you play the game well, people will tell stories about you. Generally speaking, customer bases are all connected in one way or another. If you’re successful in selling to one customer, chances are others will find out about you. You’d be amazed at how many solid businesses get built from a single success and where it inevitably leads.

One strikeout is not the end of the game. In every baseball game you get three or four turns at the plate. Just because someone doesn’t need what you are selling at the moment, it doesn’t mean that their needs will change, so you need to follow up and learn from your last at bat. If you do you will find that the process gets easier because of the things your experience has taught you.

Hope you are enjoying and getting something out of this series that is helpful.

Other posts in this series include:

The Communications Nuts & Bolts Of Building A Successful Business: 3: Marketing Tools

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/the-communications-nuts-bolts-of-building-a-successful-business-3-marketing-tools

The Communications Nuts & Bolts Of Building A Successful Business: 2. Consistent Voice

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/the-communications-nuts-bolts-of-building-a-successful-business-2-consistent-voice

The Communications Nuts & Bolts Of Building A Successful Business: 1: Branding

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/the-communications-nuts-bolts-of-building-a-successful-business-1-branding

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