Today’s Strategic Reflection Post in two sentences:
In selling, our job is to diagnose the problem, recommend the solution, master our sales process and ask for the business; the client’s job is to decide whether to buy. If we measure our performance only by whether they say yes or no, we may be judging ourselves by the one part of the process that was never ours to control.
I just finished reading The Power of Consistency by Weldon Long for the second time.
Long’s story is extraordinary, not simply because of what he eventually built, but because of how improbable any of it must have looked from where he started. After years in and out of prison, he had to begin with something much more basic than building a successful company. He had to get someone to give him a job. With his history, even that was difficult.
Eventually, he got his opportunity. He learned the business. He learned to sell. And he went on to build a multimillion-dollar company.
It is easy to encounter a story like his from the comfortable distance of the outcome. Once we know how the story ends, the earlier obstacles begin to look almost inevitable, as though each setback was simply another stepping stone towards the success waiting at the end. But the person living through it does not know the ending.
At the Scalerator® event I attended earlier this week, Rachel Renie-Gonzales shared part of her own entrepreneurial story.
In the early days, after completing entrepreneurship training with Youth Business Trinidad and Tobago, she went looking for $30,000 to help get started. She received a $10,000 startup loan. It was a fraction of what she believed she needed, but she and her partner David, started with what they had and continued to build.
The story looks very different when viewed from the other end.
In 2016, she received the EY Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year award, and in 2025 she was named the Anthony N. Sabga Awards for Caribbean Excellence Laureate for Entrepreneurship, an honour that came with a TT$500,000 cash prize.
Nearly two decades of building sit between that original $10,000 and the half-million-dollar award.
We can look at the $500,000 and see success. We can look at the $10,000 and see humble beginnings. But Rachel had to live everything in between without knowing where the story would eventually lead. At the beginning, she simply had a decision to make about what she would do with what she had.
That is what connects her story for me to Weldon Long’s.
We often measure progress by whether the world gives us the answer we wanted.
The client said yes. The investor gave us the money. The employer gave us the opportunity. The proposal was accepted. And when the answer is no, or not enough, or not yet, we can easily convert an outcome into a judgement about ourselves, the idea or the possibility.
Different stories. Different circumstances. But there is something important connecting them.
Long makes an important distinction about this in relation to selling.
Our job is to diagnose and recommend. Our job is to understand the client’s problem, master our sales process, communicate the value of the solution and do everything within our responsibility as well as we can. Our job is not to make the client buy. That decision belongs to the client. Buy or don’t buy. Yes or no.
If we have done our job well and the client chooses not to buy, the absence of a sale does not automatically mean we failed.
It means that we are using the wrong metric to measure our overall performance. We measure ourselves by an outcome that we don’t control.
Results matter.
A business cannot survive indefinitely on excellent sales conversations that produce no revenue. If the results repeatedly fail to materialize, something needs to be examined. But there is a difference between using outcomes as information and using them as identity.
A “no” can tell us something about our offer, our market, our timing, our qualification process, our communication or the client’s circumstances. It gives us something to examine. It does not necessarily mean we need to stop clarifying.
Perhaps that is one of the less glamorous meanings of wanting something badly enough.
Not wanting it so badly that we become blind to evidence or stubbornly pursue something that clearly is not working, but wanting it enough to keep diagnosing, learning and improving the part that belongs to us without trying to control the part that belongs to our customers.
Weldon Long could not force someone to hire him. Rachel Renie-Gonzales could not force someone to give her the $30,000 she asked for. A salesperson cannot force a client to say yes. Yet each of us can decide what we do with the answer we receive.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
Where are you currently measuring yourself by an outcome you don’t control, and what would change if you measured yourself instead by how well you are executing the part that belongs to you?
About Giselle
Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson — The Pre-Fixer. I help leaders see the real problem before they act, in my writing and in my work. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.
What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?
