Sales often feel like an endurance sport. Share a story about a time that you didn’t give up on a prospect and it paid off!
@KyleJepson, I feel like we know each other so well - when I first started out using HubSpot a few years ago, I spent many hours listening to you teaching the basics! 
I once spent well over two years attempting to sign up a prospective customer to our SAAS offering. They were in and out of sequences, had multiple demonstrations, a free trial… Every time correspondence gathered pace, they went quiet and disappeared again.
After several months of speculative emails (not just “checking in”, but sharing valuable resources, of course), the prospect actually replied to a marketing (not one-to-one sales) email I sent containing details of a recent blog post. The blog was educational and informative, rather than pushing our software, but something in it hit a note with one of the prospect’s key challenges and, after years of umming and ahhing, they springboarded the whole of our sales process and decided to purchase some software!
The moral of the story? Don’t give up - if you continue to provide valuable and useful resources then eventually, something might strike the note the prospect is listening out for!
I was promoted to VP of Sales to AT &T by the Amdahl Corporation in 1982. Amdahl was doing approximately $2M in revenue per year with AT &T while IBM, our major competitor, was doing $250M in revenue per year. This was a David versus Goliath undertaking. I believed we should be able to do a minimum of $100M in revenue per year. My first priniciple was to get the rioght people on the bus. The current sales team thought achieving $10M in revenue over the next 5 years was satisfactory. I replaced those four people with people who believed $100M was possible. With the right people and the right focus we generated $1.6 B (Billion not a typo) over the next 10 years while capturing 78% market share. Since we contributed over 13% of the entire corporations revenue, these results were reported in the Amdahl Corporations Annual Report to the SEC1989-1991). Check this out if you like. I am excited about joining this group and learning how Hubspot can help me to tackel the new responsibilities I have as a VP of Development for Relationship Velocity.
In a previous sales role that I held, I was responsible for trying to generate sales activity from dormant clients. After 17 contact attempts, well outside of our suggested call strategy. This was a mixture of calls and emails and touchpoints. Ultimately we saw a large deal at the end, and I was praised for not giving up.
While this was unusual and saw me deviate from our normal strategy… the effort involved in continued attempts was not massively time consuming, and the pay off greatly outweighed the time I applied to sending a few emails and making a few calls.
Great story thanks for sharing 
I should add that these attempted contacts where over the period of a year or so. I do not advocate aggressively cold calling uninterested prospects.
These were customers that had previously used our service, been pleased and then dropped off the radar. Given the nature of the clients, it was assumed they were using an alternative broker, so the aim was to get them back with us.
Once I have made contact, we established they were shopping around for the best rates and we were able to alter our pricing to win the business.
Hi Kyle. I know this post was written in August but half a year later, I still find myself thinking how long our sales cycle has become. Not in a bad way, just in a I-am-learning-to-practice-patience-way. We used to spend a lot of time trying to shorten our sales cycle. Sure, there’s some automation that can help but honestly, some people don’t want to be rushed and I’m learning how to better recognise that. So here we are, half a year later and finally those deals are closing. It’s going to be a BIG 2022 for us! Hope yours is too.