Insights··3 min
What the first day of school taught me about selling
Watching the kids go back with new notebooks, and noticing that the best reps I have worked with never stopped being students.
Ghassan Nawfal, Director of Sales, GPOS at Geidea UAE · Updated
The kids went back to school this week. New notebooks, a bit of nerves, a lot of questions. Watching them, I kept thinking about the salespeople I most admire, and how much they still look like that on a Monday.
Curiosity is a sales skill
A student walks into a class assuming there is something to learn. Too many reps walk into a discovery call assuming there is something to say. The best ones I have hired asked more questions in the first meeting than they answered, and they wrote the answers down. That is not a technique. It is a posture.
Rejection is a grade, not a verdict
Nobody fails a test and concludes they are unteachable. They look at what they got wrong. A lost deal is the same: a mark on one attempt, with a reason attached. Read the reason. The reps who stay in this job twenty years are not the ones who were never rejected, they are the ones who treated every no as feedback with a name on it.
Homework
- Before every meeting, one thing you want to learn, written down.
- After every loss, one sentence on why, from the client's mouth if you can get it.
- Every quarter, one skill you were bad at that you are now less bad at.
The mindset that survives twenty years of quota is not toughness. It is the willingness to still be a student when you are the most senior person in the room.