Episode Details

You’ve heard people say, “Sales is a grind.”

And they’re right. Sales requires relentless effort. You’ve got to make the calls, run the process, deal with internal roadblocks, handle piles of rejection, and show up every day with a smile on your face, ready to do it all over again.

But the dirty little secret is that plenty of salespeople push through the grind day after day and still don’t seem to get ahead. They put in the effort and work hard, but get nowhere. All grind, but little progress.

Here’s the truth they don’t always tell you: You can grind yourself into the ground and still fail if you don’t have the right mindset and belief system underpinning that effort.

To keep it real, I’m the person who shouts from the rooftops that you’ve got to “grind to shine.” I say that in my book Fanatical Prospecting. It’s printed on coffee mugs. I love that mantra because it’s about doing the things other people are unwilling to do.

But raw grind isn’t always enough. Sometimes, we need to pair grinding it out with tenacity.

Tenacity is a Sustainable Sales Trait

In sales, tenacity is a more sustainable trait than raw grind or pure persistence because tenacity combines persistent determination with process certainty and strategy.

Grind is about doing the daily, repetitive, rejection-dense work required for success, but it can quickly lead to frustration and burnout when it isn’t paired with enduring faith that the hard work is going to pay off. 

Tenacity, on the other hand, is grinding combined with the absolute certainty that what you expect to happen is eventually going to happen.

That’s the difference between the rep who grinds hard for a quarter, feels that they are getting nowhere, and burns out because they’re not seeing results, and the sales professional who consistently runs the sales playbook, without immediate evidence that it’s working, because they have faith that the process will eventually produce their desired outcomes.

Uncertainty Causes You to Constantly Change Your Approach

One big problem with grinding without certainty is that when results don’t show up on your impatient timeline, you start changing everything.

You make 100 calls this week using one approach. Next week, you try a different script. The week after that, you switch your targeting. Then you read an article about social selling and abandon cold calling altogether.

You’re working hard, but you’re also second-guessing every move. You change your messaging before you’ve run it long enough to know if it works. You abandon techniques after a handful of attempts. You skip or change steps in your company’s sales process after a couple of deals don’t go your way. 

When you put in massive effort, but spread that effort across ten different approa