I saw a Reddit post last week where someone asked “How much of sales is luck?”
I see sales being alot like poker in that you can't control the cards you're dealt, but if the game were really just luck, you wouldn't see the same names showing up at the World Series of Poker final year after year.
There was a popular book about 10 years ago called “The Power of Habit,” by Charles Duhigg, where one chapter looks at decision making at the poker table and how it relates to life decisions. The basic thesis was that the best poker players think probabilistically and how this perspective applies to many of life circumstances. In sales for example, bad luck happens just as often as blistering runs that light up the dashboard. In either circumstance, both the expert poker player and the best salesperson recognizes it each for the ebb and flow that it is and regardless, they don’t deviate from their overall system and principles.
Think about how easy it is to do the opposite. You close three deals in a row and suddenly you’re convinced you’ve cracked some code, so you start freelancing on your process, even cutting corners. On the opposite side, you lose two deals in a row and suddenly you’re questioning everything, second guessing a pitch that’s worked a hundred times before. Neither reaction is really about skill. It’s about mistaking a short stretch of variance for a greater signal. The best players, and the best reps, know the difference between noise and a real pattern, and they don’t let a hot or cold streak talk them into abandoning what actually works statistically over time.
A couple of specific principles from that chapter and how they apply to sales:
Expert poker players see losses as experiments: Duhigg’s study concluded that the top poker players still lose often, but they use these losses to learn better how to read the room. They view the losses as experiments for data gathering and the loss is an investment in future success and how to adjust their perception of the table. This aligns with the advice I received from an outstanding sales manager when I asked him how to handle the demo situations where you can just tell in advance that they’re not going with us. He advised me to just use them for practice on how to position us against the competition and don’t hold back.
Expert players are comfortable with the unknown: The best poker players weren’t looking for certainty at the table and they’re comfortable with the fact that they don’t know the outcome. However, they know that as the game goes on, as long as they stick to their principles and adjust them based on the incoming data (learned from the losses), the odds are going to turn in their favor. Intermediate players, by contrast are looking for certainty and thus tend to play conservative, get discouraged, abandon their system entirely or even just cash it in early.
I think about the first point every time a deal falls through. It’s tempting to treat a loss as just a loss, close it out in the CRM, and move on. But the reps who actually get better are the ones asking what that loss taught them and how to use that lesson going forward, not just the outcome itself.
The second point might be the more important one. New reps want certainty. They want to know a deal is going to close before it closes, and that need for certainty makes them chase the wrong signals or panic at the wrong moments. Experienced reps make peace with not knowing. They trust that if they keep running the same sound process on enough opportunities, the math eventually works out in their favor, the same way it does for a poker player who’s willing to sit through a losing stretch without changing how they play the hand.