One of the most exciting moments of my life lasted just fifteen minutes. I was tapped as a substitute player for the last few minutes of a rival game against Watford Football Club.
While those few minutes of play were exhilarating and a moment that will forever stick with me, it’s the drills and training sessions with my teams that really shaped me into the person I am today. During a routine practice with the youth team, the coach singled me out of the group and instructed me to perform a new exercise. The exercise, which was punching bag training off the field, was unfamiliar to me and whatsmore away from my teammates. About halfway through my coach asked if I knew why he wanted me to do this alone and if this exercise was well suited for a player of my level (now that I’d been promoted). Confused by the question – he continued on to give me one of the most important pieces of advice I had ever (and still to the day) received. He said, “no matter how talented or intelligent you are or get, hard work, determination and humbleness is what will define you and shape your future. No matter how great your success may be”.
In my first career, I was a professional footballer – now I’m VP of Sales at tech unicorn and CRM provider, Pipedrive. Reflecting back on the lessons I’ve learned throughout my career have shown me the parallels between success in football and in sales. How we persevere, how we handle mistakes, losses and how we communicate with our team makes us successful.
Failure is a lesson
Handling failure with grace and an open mind is one of the most important qualities for every salesperson. Because failure is simply part of the business. For every successful sales call, there are at least four that failed
When you lose a game or your team doesn’t make the next round you don’t consider the season a failure. You don’t consider all the practices and late days as a failure. You and your team would use the experience as motivation for the next year. Same goes for your day-to-day failures.
It’s important that salespeople do not interpret these experiences as personal failures. Rather, they are lessons; opportunities to learn and improve. Why did the lead decline? What can I learn from the conversation to improve the next one? Do I need to adjust the offer or practice my conversational skills?
Hearing a ‘no’ from a potential customer is frustrating, of course, just as an unforced error is in football – but we need to learn to make them work for us.
Team over everything
No matter if you’re a salesperson or a footballer, a team is critical to your success. In both professions, the relationship between the individual members and the team is very ambivalent. Footballers and salespeople are part of a community – and yet they often try to assert themselves within the team as if against a competitor. Footballers, for example, try to sign the next lucrative contract; salespeople try to close the big deal and secure the bonus for themselves.
In my opinion, the ability to work in a team – in addition to the ability to deal with failure and pressure – is a necessary quality for every salesperson. For me, this ability was shaped by the dressing room speech of a former coach before an important game. He swore us in with the words: “One of you will have a bad day today.” At first we were unsure what he meant. Then he elaborated, “And that is not a bad intention on that person’s part. It is simply the law of averages. It is up to you to stand by this person and help him through this phase. Because if you don’t define yourselves as a team, then you will lose more than you win!”
It was in moments like these that I understood the importance of team. The importance of standing side by side, communicating learnings and experiences, not blaming anyone. It is important to apply such skills in professional fields like sales. Even if sales tends to sometimes incentivise individualism over team spirit, e.g. by the means of success bonuses and the likes. In such moments, we must remember that success as a team also means individual success. If team goals are met, overall revenue is increased, joint success is celebrated, then everyone benefits in the end.
The learning curve never stops
Just as important as a team’s success is, as much as it welds us together, success is fleeting. Whenever I start to lose motivation or have a feeling of loss I consistently go back to the punching bag exercise and reflect on all of the other learning moments throughout my career that have shaped my work ethic.
As footballers, we always had to train hard, push ourselves, improve, and run faster. A good game was the result of all the practice before and after games. . The same applies to sales. I think about all the calls I’ve made, notes I’ve taken and relationships I’ve built and it reminds me of how far I’ve come and how much more there is yet to do.
Although I never want to propagate a “the best is not good enough” mentality, rather I want to sharpen the senses that even the greatest success should not lead us to remaining stagnant. The market is constantly changing, customer needs and requirements are evolving and so should you… The learning curve never ends!
Everybody has their own ‘Old Trafford’
Of course, I know that only very few sales people are ex-footballers who can draw career wisdom from a miss at Old Trafford. But our work ethic, our approach to success and failure, and team play are universal traits that define success in sales. And each of us has had experiences from which to shape and hone these traits. No matter if these were made on the football field, in school or through family dynamics. Let’s look for these anecdotes – and draw the appropriate lessons.
