The sooner you learn this, the more skilled you'll be

A quick story, followed by a question.

About 4 months ago, I needed to refill my sales pipeline with new leads. I reached out to my existing customers and asked if they had any referrals for me.

One of them said yes and made a warm introduction to an ideal prospect. Great!

We had a meeting, where I worked to discover their pain and connect it with my solution. Seemed like a good match to me.

But, they came back with the dreaded "Not right now."

I know the trick to handling this one. I said, "Okay, that’s fine with me, but can we hold time on the calendar in 3 months to sync up again?" They agreed.

A few days before the meeting, they declined the invite with a no thank you.

Now, the question: was this all a waste of time?

I spent a decent bit of energy on these touch points and I didn’t get anywhere close to a sale.

The answer is no, and the reason is that in business, you can do all the right things and still lose.

Many people find this reality discouraging and quit, so this week I want to talk about the psychology to succeed in spite of it.

Expected value

The right way to look at every move you make in your business is through the lens of expected value (EV). You try something, and whether it does what you want it to is probabilistic.

For example, imagine a coin will land on heads 70% of the time. Should you bet on the outcome of the coin flip? Given enough flips, absolutely. But, you have to expect to lose on a flip once in a while.

Now, imagine your business. Maybe you decide that you need more awareness, so you start posting on social media. In one week, your post engagement might be terrible, and in another it might be great. The outcome is a function of your post quality and variance.

It’s easy to forget about variance and assume your short-term results are a direct reflection of how good your ideas are, which is why many founders prematurely quit a winning strategy.

If you think in terms of EV, you don’t need to second-guess ideas you intuitively know are good.

What separates you

If you find what I’ve said so far discouraging, let me share the upside. If you expect to occasionally lose when you do the right thing, know that at that moment, many, many others will decide to quit, and some of those people are your competitors.

If running a business was easy, everyone would do it. The market would be flooded with products and it would be incredibly hard to stand out.

So it’s a good thing that this is hard.

Conserving energy

There’s yet another upshot to thinking in terms of expected value. You have a finite amount of time and energy each day, and when other founders encounter negative variance, they burn both of those questioning whether they are doing the right thing.

But if you’re already schooled on a good strategy, you don’t need to waste energy thinking about it. You’re at the level of unconscious competence and can use that energy thinking about other things worth your attention.