Persistence And Variety

In B2B software sales, we like to believe the clever pitch or the killer demo wins deals. In my experience, they are won by two far less glamorous things: persistence and variety.

Enterprise deals move slowly. A serious sale can take months, sometimes years. Champions change roles. Budgets freeze. Priorities shift. Many deals die not because the product was wrong, but because the seller gave up too early, or kept doing the same thing and expected a different result.

Persistence is staying with an account long after it stops being exciting. Remaining engaged, quietly and patiently, while others move on to easier opportunities.

But persistence without adapting becomes stubbornness. That is where variety matters.

If the economic buyer will not engage, you find another route in. If the ROI argument is not landing, you reframe it around risk. If the demo did not move them, you bring in a relevant customer story. You keep generating angles, borrowing ideas from very different deals, trying, discarding, and trying again.

All the while, you continue refining the approach that appears to be working best.

What looks like a gifted closer is often simply someone who refused to quit and kept changing the approach until something opened.

Persistence keeps you in the game. Variety is how you eventually win it.