When you sell for a living, especially in B2B selling, one of your biggest obstacles is your competition. Just when you think you’ve got them nailed, they change and come out with a product so advanced that the customers you just won over (or so you thought) go running back. Sometimes it gets like a ping pong match. One week they like you, the next they’ll "never do business with you again." It can be frustrating, let alone draining. But it’s very real.

The pressure in these situations can be so intense that we’ll bend over backwards to get our customers back. Sometimes, we’ll even be "a little less than truthful" by telling our customers that we can do something that we know we can’t. When they give us the business we take it back to the office and beg our bosses until we’re blue in the face to get it done. We’ll even tell our bosses "I gave them our word and I won’t back down on my word. We have to get it done!" In the process of doing this we create all kinds of stress and anxiety for the people in our back office trying to get the deal done.

I had a manager at one time share with me an excellent analogy regarding this. He said, "If you’re selling shoes and in your bag you have green shoes, brown shoes and red shoes, would you tell your customer that you can get them blue shoes? Of course you wouldn’t! That would be ludicrous! Why then, are you doing just that with our products? You know we don’t offer it but you sell it anyway. Why?" That’s a great question.

It’s important to realize that every action and decision we make affects someone else in the process. We can’t go out and haphazardly do things without thinking about the end result. Yes, your business is very important and without it there wouldn’t be any money to pay the back office. But it’s also important to remember that there would be no one to process the business without the back office. Both components are equally important. One can’t exist without the other. As an old friend once told me, "If you make a cake and you leave out the eggs, cake without eggs ain’t cake."

I know you can do it, and I definitely believe in you!