Transformation Through the Sales Slump

All of us have met people who, through their charisma and confidence, magnetically attract others like gathering fish in a net. What makes them that way? Were they born with that strength of character? Maybe. Can you develop that character? Certainly. It takes genuine humility and perseverance. A good role model helps too.

Take Saint Peter for instance. Here is a guy who spent his whole life fishing. He definitely knew how to catch fish yet there was a time, when he first met Jesus when he was in a slump (Lk 5:1-11). He had spent the whole night at sea casting nets and dredging through sea foam, probably to the point when there wasn’t a spot of water he hadn’t covered, till he finally gave up. After all that, Jesus asked him to try again. Now, Peter was a proud man but he respected Jesus too much to contradict him or maybe he wanted to honor his brother Andrew who introduced him to Jesus. For whatever initial reason, Peter put out to sea again despite an inward lack of trust, feeling emotionally weary, physically exhausted and mentally baffled. At that point, the point that breaks men’s will, Peter had his greatest catch and his greatest breakthrough. Even though he hardly believed that one more try could make a difference, when he and the neighboring men in their boats hauled in the net it was filled beyond overflowing to the point where the net was breaking. That huge catch was probably enough to pay down Peter’s debts but that wasn’t why he begged Jesus to forgive his sinfulness. He begged Jesus out of humility, having seen his faults so clearly. That experience had transformed him. He would go on to become the kind of man who could, with a single spirit-filled speech, convert three thousand bystanders to Christianity (Acts 2:14-41).

Applying this story to your sales experience involves more than just saying ‘hang in there and your leads will pan out soon’. When all your prospects run out and deadlines for goals expire, when your energy to place another call dries up, when the phone is too heavy to lift and all your options seem exhausted, a moral like ‘hang in there’ is just plain trite. Yes, it’s true, that is the time to persevere. Not so much because the next call could be a huge catch, which it could. But because picking up the phone when it all seems impossible is the time that makes the biggest difference in you. It builds your character into the kind of person that gains strength not through the sale but through surpassing perceived boundaries. It makes you into the kind of person that others want to be around because you are able lift their spirits with your own stories of difficult times. It makes you real instead beyond their reach. And that gives others hope and helps them endure to reach their goals. In short it attracts people to you and affects change in them as well. Just like Peter, your humility and persistence, with the help of God, transforms you from a fisherman into a fisher of men.