Let it Unfold

A lack of patience can harm you.

Photo by Aren Nagulyan on Unsplash

I had an unusually busy week that ended on Thursday and I’m just catching up. I’ll have another post on Thursday and by next Monday, I’ll be back on track. It reminded me of something I learned a long time ago, and it’s such a critical lesson on your way to success.

I’ve made the case before in a prior Substack about when to stop selling. There comes a point when you lose the customer, when you vomit your sales pitch all over them and keep doing it. You’ve crossed the sales curve, and now the customer wants nothing to do with you. You have to know when to stop selling!

The same holds true when people try to force events and milestones to occur with customers rather than letting them unfold in their natural order. Trying to force someone to act when they are not yet ready is a case in point. You can’t make an offer on a house until you’re ready to take action yourself, no matter how much the seller pushes you to make that offer. It becomes annoying, and it badly harms the seller.

I’ve had job candidates over-sell themselves and bother me to the point where I’d never hire them. They push me for a decision I’m not yet ready to make. They can’t seem to get the message and thus disqualify themselves.

The same holds true for any decision to be made by someone else. Asking them to hurry up doesn’t help the sale. It harms it and can kill the deal in one meeting. There is nothing that turns off a buyer faster than pushing a sale. HubSpot once surveyed buyers on the words they associate with salespeople, and “pushy” topped the list at 50%. Half of all buyers used that exact word. What buyers said they wanted most was someone who listens to their needs. Nobody has ever described a good listener as pushy.

Sometimes the best solution to a series of events you want to see happen is to just do nothing and wait for the events to unfold on their own. Focus on something else and leave the deal alone. We’ve all heard the expression, “Some things just take time.” It’s a lesson most of us learn as kids, but some adults don’t get it and think they can force something to happen, not realizing it’s a recipe for failure. Enterprise deals routinely take six months to a year to close, and no amount of nagging compresses that. The buyer’s process is the buyer’s process.

Often, when someone is pushy, those they are pushing against see them as unrefined, ill-mannered, and lacking in class. It’s considered a lack of social standing. The Rolls-Royce dealer doesn’t hound you to buy. They won’t even call you. You go to them. Yet someone on a used car lot would make the call. We even use the expression, “used car salesman” to describe pushy people.

My mother called that inability to understand subtleties a lack of couth, and she would point out that it’s something you can’t teach people. Either they have it, or they don’t. They can’t grasp that some business takes time, which is why you work on multiple fronts with lots of different customers, so you’re not dependent on any one.

It’s such a small detail, but it can make all the difference between constant failure and constant success. Learn how to play time, even when you don’t have a lot of it.