Making a sale is like digging for gold. Both jobs require intense effort. In digging for gold, regardless of the method chosen (e.g., panning, sluicing, mining), the chances are you will need to sift through tons of gravel, stones, rocks, and soil before finding the gold.

In sales, chances are you will need to expect receiving lots of no's before you receive that longed-for yes. Think of sales appointments (or opportunities) as tons of dirt which you need to sift through on your way to getting a yes.

Knowledge of theory and proven techniques are important in both pursuits, but there is, for the most part, no surefire way of getting to the the gold or getting to the yes quickly and easily.

Moreover, there is a huge difference between just working hard and working smart. The salesperson could cold call a thousand persons at random from a phone book, and the searcher for gold could flip a coin to decide whether location A is better than location B. A smarter idea is to do enough research (prep work) to give you both a leg up on the competition and to increase your chances getting a payoff.