You Don’t Get Paid for Giving Up

You don’t help your dream client produce better results by giving up pursuing them. If what you do would improve their results, they need you to persist.

You don’t help your company by quitting when the client you want is on lockdown because due to their deep relationship with your competitor. Their loyalty is one of the attributes that make them such an attractive client.

You don’t help yourself by calling it quits when a prospect is difficult to acquire, and there are no bonuses, commissions, or accolades for not winning a client—or for a lack of intestinal fortitude.

You don’t gain any real additional time by eliminating the effort of chasing down the most desirable prospects. You are going to be prospecting, making sales calls, and selling anyway. Instead, you’ll likely be doing the same things every day, but just with prospects who aren’t quite as good as the ones you gave up pursuing.

You are going to eliminate some prospects from consideration because they don’t value what you do, prospects for whom you are a for fit. You are going to disqualify others because they are a poor fit for you and your company, being unwilling to invest in the results you produce or possessing a culture that makes them undesirable. You will lose some contests to competitors, and some of those losses will likely be your dream clients, where the competition is immense.

The only people who win their dream clients are the people who professionally pursue them over time. The reason so many others fail isn’t that their offering isn’t right, that they lack the salesmanship, or that an opportunity will never present itself. Instead, they lose because they give up too soon and aren’t present when that opportunity becomes available.

Persist. Persist. Persist. Persist.

The great Harvey McKay learned from a veteran salesperson that the right time to give up is when “They die, or you die.” I suggest that even after one of you dies, you call for the next three to four weeks, just to make certain. You never know.