You don’t want to depend on luck when it comes to success in sales. The best way to succeed in B2B sales is to develop yourself personally and professionally and do the work with a consistency that borders on obsession. If they are telling the truth, anyone who succeeds will acknowledge luck played a role in their success. Here is how you get lucky in sales.
Fortunate Timing
You have called your dream client for over eighteen months, using the right tools to nurture the relationship and capturing mindshare, how they view their business and starting to change their mind about individual decisions. On this particular day, your dream client picks up the phone, and for the first time, engages you in a conversation.
Three minutes earlier, your contact would not have been at their desk. Three minutes later, they would be tied up in an operations meeting for the rest of the afternoon. Had you missed the window, you would have found your way back to their voicemail, failing to gain a meeting for the twenty-second time.
Today, good fortune smiled on you, and you acquired the commitment for time, an appointment to meet to explore what’s possible. Had you not made the call, luck would not have been possible.
Lucky Connection
Your longtime client has a friend who called to inform him that she was just hired to lead a hot, new company in your territory. While they were talking about their time in college together and her exciting new opportunity, she mentioned that she need help in the very area where you can make a difference.
You had nothing to do with the contact getting the new job, nor were you responsible for the location happens to be in your territory. You could have never known that your client’s friend was going to take the position. Instead, you are the beneficiary of luck.
Had you not taken great care of your existing client, there is no way he would have vouched for you, nor would he have been comfortable making an introduction. Because you have always been proactive and continuously trying to drive new value, you have a meeting with the new contact—and, more than likely, a new client.
Easy Relationships
You walk in the door to meet your prospective client. You sit down in their office, and even though you professionally opened the sales call, the conversation is easy, as if you have known each other forever. As the business conversation continues, you both recognize that you are going to have a productive working relationship. Leaving the meeting, you are confident you are going to win the business, and your contact knows they are going to work with you.
You don’t always have such a strong connection with a contact, and some contacts are more challenging to connect with personally and professionally. It’s luck that you found this contact, and the strong preference to work with you is the luck of good chemistry.
The fact that you have a fast relationship wasn’t due to anything you or your contact did. Instead, the immediate rapport was the result of luck. Had this client been one street further North, they would have been in another’s reps territory, and they would have belonged to your rival. Thankfully, you work your region.
Right Idea, Right Time
For three years, you have tried to convince a prospect to look at a solution you are dead certain will benefit them. In all that time, your prospective client has done nothing but resist the idea, believing it isn’t the right idea for them. But now, your potential client’s most significant customer has changed the terms of their contract (your prospect’s largest), and continuing to do things they have always done them will cost them their account.
You have never met your client’s largest customer. Nor did you have anything to do with their new demands of your prospective clients. The circumstances just happened to serve you.
As luck would have it, you made a call to follow up on the idea you have continually shared with them for much longer than anyone would have persisted. The idea that was wrong for the last three years is now an answer to your dream client’s entire C-Level executive suite’s prayers. You are the beneficiary of having the right solution at the right time.
Competitor Fails
Your competitor has long been struggling to produce the results for a large client they won. You competed, and you believed in your heart that you would have done a better job. But you lost, and they won, as it goes in sales, even when you do everything right.
Your competitor’s failure is the result of their losing two key members of their team, both of whom were recruited away by a larger company in another state. They had no leadership pipeline, and no one on their side had the experience to execute for the client. You have followed up every thirty days, always reminding the client you were waiting in the wings.
The primary contact calls you to tell you they made a mistake, that you were a very close second, and to ask you to help them turn things around. You are, in large part, the recipient of the gift of your competitor’s bad luck.
Luck In Sales
B2B salespeople cannot count on good luck in sales, it being capricious and fickle, you can make sure you are in a position to take advantage of the good fortune that comes your way. You do that by always taking action, continuously working on improving your sales approach and sales strategies, and doing your very best to take care of your client and your prospects.
The more you do what professional B2B sales requires of you, the luckier you will be when it comes to positive buying decisions, the ones that go your way. Avoiding the work is to ensure that no breaks come your way. Luck loves a hustler and punishes sloth, entitlement, apathy, and complacency. Your effort is what allows for luck.
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