Christian Polk argues that judging yourself only on closed deals creates emotional chaos and hides what you can control. Instead, rate each call on whether the conversation was good and whether you felt like the most comfortable, authoritative person in the room. This process focus keeps you stable and actually improves your close rate because skill development drives results.
Chapters
Most closers measure success the wrong way. That's why they're stuck at just closing 30 to 40% of their sales calls. At the end of every call, a closer who's stuck at 30, 40% will just ask himself, hey, did the call close or did the call not close? This is the wrong metric because if it didn't close, then you see yourself as a failure. But if it did close, you see yourself as a success. But at the end of the day, what if it was a laydown? Or what if you're talking to a homeless guy like under a bridge? Some things are just outside of our control. So in order to actually improve in sales and become the best closer you can be, You need to change the metric of success and ask yourself at the end of every call, not did it close or did it not close to, hey, did I have a good call and was I the most comfortable person in the conversation? Because if you had a good call, you followed your structure and you were the most comfortable person in the conversation, that means you're confident, you had authority, and those things are going to translate. And that's going to help you actually gauge if it was a successful call or not. This also separates you from, hey, did it close, did it not close, and the emotional ups and downs of that. So that way throughout your day, you can have a 90% plus success rate And we can continue to improve on that and just focus on the skills rather than just purely the outcome. Because if you focus on the skills and you make sure the skills are tacked in and if you make sure the skills are where they need to be, the score will take care of itself and you'll close more deals because of it.
