I have a great success story from one of my reps that I want to pass on! This fellow met with a large corporate prospect of ours today; the client has 160 stores and 3,000 employees and is one of the biggest opportunities in his territory. The call went well and it looks like we will be providing them products and services on a go forward basis - enough business that they should end up as one of our top ten accounts over the next 12 months.

After hearing about this win, I logged in to our CRM to take a look at the length of the sales cycle with this client. I knew that we had been persuing them for the past three years and wanted to find out why this particular rep had succeeded where a previous rep had failed. The key to closing this client was patient persistance. The previous rep had ultimately found the buyer but had only put 4 activities (calls/emails) in over a 2 year period to try and book a face to face sales call. The new rep, on the other hand, logged a persistant 18 activities over a 5 month period before booking the first meeting. 

I would encourage you to take a look at your stuck accounts/prospects and ask yourself if you have exhausted every possible avenue to gaining an appointment. Throw another call in (and let them know you will be following up on the message if they don’t return your call), send a letter, use their company internet to find a new contact or drop in in person. Eventually you will be rewarded and your sales will grow substantially.