GV – Never take NO for an Answer

GV will be leaving shortly to UK on work (I will miss all the wonderful informative sessions with him). Since we were busy with work we didn't realize it was 2:00 PM already. The lunch in office is served only till 2:00 PM, so as a caring boss GV offered to take me out for lunch (I wish we get late for lunch every dayJ). During our lunch we spoke many interesting stuff, one of them was "Never Take NO for an Answer (NTNA)" (I guess this is going to be the title of my second bookJ).

What is NTNA?

Most of the times we tend to accept the defeat even before waging the war (ohh forget about waging the war, even before planning for it). Okay, let me simplify this. GV quoted a wonderful example "Let us say we go to a PUB (Bangalore is known for awesome PUBSJ, suitable example). I see a beautiful girl and wish to dance with her, now the probability of the girl saying Yes is 50% and probability of she saying NO is 50%. Most of the times we assume that she would say NO and would not dare to ask her…resulting in loss of prospect/opportunity. We completely forget the probability of her accepting it and saying Yes to it. We forget completely that both Yes and No have equal probability in this situation. If you can convert 50% of NO to 100% why can't we do it for YES? We don't lose our life by giving a try. All you have to do is ask her, if she says no then keep trying till you get a Yes. Never Take NO for an Answer."

This is such an awesome theory. I feel this is a perfect formula to be a good sales executive. During my previous employment we participated in a government bid, we lost the tender/order. Since I had worked really hard on the tender I wasn't willing to give-up the sale. The deal was won by HCL Technologies – if I had accepted the NO it was a dead sale, instead I approached HCL to check if they want to outsource it to us – the answer was clear NO. I mean come on why HCL would outsource it to a small company like ours. I then approached the VP to check if they need any resources for the project (I guess since I had been following-up for a long time, he agreed to meet us and discuss). After presenting him the strategy he finally agreed to engage 20% of our resources into the project on contract. (After this I left the organization, so not sure what happened). I was really happy that we could get a small piece of the project outsourced to us in spite of losing the tender.

Action Item: "Never Take NO for an Answer (NTNA)" and A deal/sale is lost only when you give-up.