The Boring Path to Sales Success
Ask any top sales performer the secret to their success, and chances are, you won’t get a flashy answer. You won’t hear about a secret script or a viral campaign or some once-in-a-lifetime pitch that changed everything. What you’ll hear — if they’re being honest — is something much simpler, and far less exciting:
💡Sales Success Comes Down To Consistency, Discipline, And A Commitment To The Basics.
In other words, success in sales comes down to doing the boring work. Every day, for long periods of time.
This is why I love the tweet by Shane Parrish from July 2023. It articulated so well what I’ve long wrestled with internally.
He says:
“Success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time, without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you think you are.”
— Shane Parrish, July 30, 2023
It’s deceptively simple advice. And yet, it’s exactly the kind of wisdom that separates a flash-in-the-pan rep from a perennial top performer.
The Myth of Overnight Success
In sales, it’s easy to get distracted by the myth of overnight success. Social media feeds are full of people hitting President’s Club in their first year, signing seven-figure deals, or launching side hustles that “blew up.” But what rarely makes the highlight reel is the daily grind behind those wins: the hundreds of cold calls, the follow-up emails that went unanswered, the pipeline reviews, the rejections, the learning curves, the deals that fell through.
Most of the time, success is not glamorous — it’s repetitive.
It’s about showing up every day and doing the foundational work:
- Researching accounts before your outreach
- Following up - sometimes 12+ times - until you get a response
- Logging activity and keeping your CRM clean
- Practicing critical listening to identify real pain-points and tailoring your pitch to highlight how your value prop solves their real problem
- Building and maintaining relationships that may not pay off for months to years
- And perhaps most important of all: Being available when your prospect needs you
None of these things are “sexy.” But they are what drive results over time.
The Obvious Work Most People Avoid
Sales isn’t a mystery. We all know what leads to pipeline and closed revenue. We all know the quips like “people buy from people.” The challenge isn’t the knowing — it’s the doing.
Parrish calls this “doing the obvious thing.”
In sales, doing the obvious thing equals showing up every day and making touches - calls, texts, emails, in-person visits, etc and doing it in a way that allows you to stand out from the crowd. There’s no shortage of AI driven or copy & paste outreach today. I get a dozen emails a day that I can immediately tell were drafted this way.
Strip away all the noise and be authentic. If you take nothing else away from this article, let it be this.
Don’t treat your prospects like they are a number, treat them like a person. Try to have real conversations. If you can, create unique experiences for them to stand out from the crowd.
For instance, there were several accounts early on in my career that I won by sending them a handwritten card with a personalized note and a gift card to Starbucks to “cover the coffee I was going to buy you if you hadn’t ghosted me.”
At the time, I was just trying to get a call back - and you know what? It worked. Not every time, but enough of the time to make a difference.
But that’s not a 100% success guaranteed/microwave result process either. This type of personalized touch only worked if I had done my homework (aka the obvious thing) for several weeks. Typically I would try conventional methods for at least a month or two before I went down this route. Many times, I never even had to do this, because said conventional methods led to a real conversation.
The point is, don’t chase hacks or quick fixes. Pick up the phone and make calls. Focus on having real conversations. Listen more than you speak. Qualify (or disqualify) your leads and don’t just shove a solution that has no value for them. Answer the phone when they call. Create experiences that make you stick out in their mind.
Do this every day for long enough and you will succeed. Where most reps go wrong is giving up on individual prospects too soon - or - on the process altogether because they don’t get results as fast as they’d like.
Show up daily. Do the work. Trust the process.