So You’re in Sales? Welcome to Hell.
Today’s post is for all of you who are in sales. Stay strong.
Selling is hard. Selling is brutal. Selling is, quite honestly, one long psychological experiment where you are both the scientist and the lab rat, except the lab rat is also on fire, and the scientist is laughing. And despite all the advances in targeting, segmenting, and AI-powered buyer analysis, it’s still IMO, at its core, a numbers game.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Turtle vs. hare. All the clichés apply because selling is about mindset first and tactics second.
Here’s the harsh truth: someone is always buying. Always. Even when your pipeline looks like a barren wasteland where hope goes to die—someone, somewhere, is buying.
A study (that I cannot for the life of me remember the source of, but trust me, it’s real because I’ve lived it) breaks it down like this:
3% of the market is actively buying.
7% intend to buy soon.
30% have a need but aren’t ready to act.
30% don’t have a need.
30% wouldn’t buy from you if you were selling life vests on the Titanic.
That means 10% of people are in the game right now. The rest? Some will. Some won’t. So what. Next.
I remember watching The Revenant years ago. Great movie. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) spends most of it crawling through the wilderness, half-dead, clawing his way back to life while John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) tries to ensure his suffering continues. That’s exactly what a sales career feels like. Prospects will ghost you. Deals will die on the finish line. Rejection will take up permanent residence in your inbox. The universe will laugh as you ask, "Circling back on this?" for the fourth time.
But here’s the thing: if you keep pushing through the miserable, mundane, and mind-numbing task of prospecting, something shifts.
The habit becomes a skill. The skill becomes second nature. And suddenly, you’re winning.
At some point, you realize you are Sisyphus, eternally rolling the same boulder up the same hill, only to watch it tumble down again. But unlike Sisyphus, you have a quota to hit and bills to pay, so you keep pushing. The rock doesn’t care. The pipeline doesn’t care. But you push anyway, because that’s what sales is—an absurd, endless struggle punctuated by fleeting moments of triumph.
If you can survive in sales, nothing in life can keep you down for long. The world might still try to kick you in the teeth, but after years of hearing “not interested” and “now’s not a good time,” you develop an immunity to the gut punches.
So, embrace the grind. Someone is buying. Keep going until they find you. Or at least until you can afford therapy.
Welcome to hell. You’ll get used to it.
© 2025, Lawain McNeil, Mission Surrender, LLC.
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