My first sales call

After I spent a year as a trainee for sales in a publishing house I was ready to take on the real world. I had my own portfolio of accounts and a new shiny title of Key Account Manager. Naturally at first I wanted to contact the biggest already buying client there was. I needed to secure that account as it was a huge portion of my quota so I nervously took the phone and made the call. And I “lost” the whole account in that first call. That is one painful memory but also later on turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Let me tell you why.

So back to the call. It was an FMCG brand who a year before had spent large sums to the products I was selling at the time - Magazines. When I made the call to their media agency who were doing the buying for them and introduced myself as the new point of contact for the account the answer was short; “thanks for letting us know. We will not be doing any magazines this year as we are focusing on tactical medias. No need to meet now. Talk later. Bye.”

There I was, my heart racing and mind scrolling through all the learnings from sales trainings, how to handle objections, tackle a no, how to get the meeting anyway etc.

All I got out of my mouth was: “Okay, thanks for letting me know. Bye.”

There are a few learnings on this and the first one happened when I immediately started to walk to my managers room to deliver the devastating news. The aisle felt long and I was kind of embarrassed and a bit scared as well to deliver the news that I lost my biggest client pretty much on day one. I was thinking if I did something wrong and what the answer will be.

I told the news to my manager at the time and sat there in her room waiting for the answer. She took it pretty well. Actually she did not even respond anything. She just kept on typing some mails and shrugged her shoulders. Then when she saw me still sitting there waiting for the reply with more pale face than usual she realised my distress and turned to face me saying: “Oh, you got a bit shaken by that call did you? Look, this is sales, its wins and losses. You will get them back don’t worry. Keep going.”

I was relieved. And I still remember that. Sales is not only about wins. Wins can be often easy and sometimes you “win” a deal even if you did not play much role in it. But its the “losses” that offer you ways to learn and grow. I it is at least as equally important to learn to lose than it is to win.

I bounced back from my first call and since then I have lost and won a lot of deals. But to keep going I owe some credit to my first manager. If she would have pushed me down I am not sure if I would work in sales today.

I also won the client back later. And that gave me the biggest learning in my sales career: the Simon Sineks Golden Circle. I will share a bit more of that on my next post.

So it turned out to be a very valuable first sales call.

Do you still remember some of your first sales calls - any story to share? Or how do you deal with losses? I feel we often share the wins but what losses and learnings are there to share? What are your thoughts?