I commented last week on a post by Brian Wells, a building materials sales leader, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Brian asked a pointed question: does anyone in sales leadership actually want reps to build trust anymore? He laid out the math a lot of companies run — a rep who takes eighteen months to build the kind of trust where a customer calls you first, before checking price, costs money every one of those months. A rep who hits quota fast by being aggressive looks cheaper on paper, right now. So the real question isn’t whether trust matters. Everybody agrees it does. The question is whether you’re willing to accept the cost of building it.
My response to Brian was that this isn’t a building-materials problem. It’s everywhere. And I want to expand on why, because there’s a bigger shift underneath it.
The Bottle Rocket Rep
Plenty of companies are constantly shooting for what I call the bottle rocket rep — someone who can “hit the ground running” and post some quick hits. Words cannot describe how much I hate that phrase, and I’ll tell you why in a minute.
The bottle rocket rep gets some early wins without ever really learning the business, the customers, or the dynamics of how the buyers actually make decisions. They go up fast and bright, and they tend to be short-term in both performance and attitude. If they succeed at posting quick numbers, those numbers seldom last, because they were built on activity and aggression rather than on any real foundation. And if they don’t succeed, they’re gone within the year. Either way, you’re back to hiring.
I tell my clients something that makes a lot of them uncomfortable: if you do it right, you probably won’t turn a profit on a new rep for the first twelve to eighteen months. The B2B industry stats back this up. But the companies that accept that reality make a lot of money on those reps over the long haul, because they’ve built something that lasts. The good companies get this. The ones that don’t get it usually stop being my clients, one way or another.
Why This Is Harder Now Than It Used to Be
Here’s the part that connects to something I’ve been writing about for a while, and it’s the reason this whole conversation is more urgent than it was ten years ago.
Selling used to come with a built-in dose of immediate gratification. When I started, you could pick up the phone and reliably set six to ten cold appointments a week. That meant a new rep — even one who didn’t fully understand the business yet — could generate visible activity fast. They could see progress. They could feel the wheels turning. The phone gave you a quick, repeatable hit of forward motion, and that immediate reward made the slower work of actually building relationships tolerable, because you had something to show while you did it.
That immediate gratification is fading. Not gone, but fading. The phone’s contact ratios have collapsed — where you once got a live conversation every three or four dials, you might now dial fifteen times to reach one human being. The phone as a stand-alone appointment-setting machine doesn’t deliver the quick hits it used to.
Let me be clear here, because I always am on this point: I am not telling you to abandon the phone. The phone still works. But it’s one instrument in the band now, not a solo act. It plays alongside LinkedIn, referrals, email, content, and everything else that goes into modern prospecting.
There is a real consequence to all of this, but it’s not one we can change. When the phone’s immediate gratification has been taken away and replaced with a slower, multi-channel approach that pays off over weeks and months instead of days, selling has been turned into a delayed-gratification profession. I didn’t do this. You didn’t do this. Your peers didn’t do this. Your customers did — because buyer preferences and habits have changed. That makes this a Waters issue in the Navigator’s Chart, and we can’t change the Waters. We can only build our Vessel to sail them.
The reward for doing the work right now shows up later — sometimes much later. The dopamine hit of six appointments booked on a Tuesday morning has been replaced by the slow accumulation of relationships, credibility, and trust that eventually produces a customer who calls you first.
Most People Are Wired for the Bottle Rocket
The trouble is that most people, and most companies, are wired for immediate gratification, not delayed. It’s human nature. We want the win now, not in eighteen months.
This is exactly why the bottle rocket rep is so seductive. They promise the immediate hit that our brains crave, and in a market where the phone no longer supplies that hit as reliably, the temptation to chase reps who seem to generate instant results gets even stronger. Companies feel the immediate gratification disappearing from the actual work, so they try to hire it back in the form of aggressive reps who promise quick numbers.
It doesn’t work, because you can’t shortcut a delayed-gratification game by hiring impatient people to play it. You just get the revolving door — the quick flameout, the soft quarters nobody can explain, and the constant wondering why nothing sticks.
Building a Vessel That Can Wait
We can’t change the Waters, but we can build a Vessel to sail them. If selling is becoming a delayed-gratification profession, then the companies that win are the ones built to absorb the wait. That’s a structural question, not a willpower question.
It means a compensation plan that doesn’t starve a good rep to death during the twelve to eighteen months before they’re profitable. It means performance reviews that measure the leading indicators of trust-building — the right activity, the right relationships, the right accounts being worked the right way — and not just this month’s closed business. It means hiring for patience, curiosity, and staying power rather than for the candidate who talks the best game about hitting the ground running. And it means leadership that has genuinely decided, on purpose, to accept the cost of building trust rather than letting short-term math win by default.
That last part is the whole thing. Most companies never actually decide. They don’t sit down and choose the bottle rocket over the long-term builder. They just have comp plans, review cycles, and quarterly pressure that all reward the quick hit, and the short-term math wins because nobody built the system to choose otherwise.
The Payoff for Patience
The companies that build a Vessel to absorb the cost of trust end up with reps nobody can poach, because those reps have relationships and credibility that don’t transfer and don’t evaporate. The companies that don’t end up with a revolving door and can’t figure out why nothing sticks.
The phone gave us a long run of immediate gratification, and it made a certain kind of impatient selling viable for decades. That era is closing — not because anyone in sales decided it should, but because our buyers changed the Waters underneath us. What replaces it rewards patience: the rep’s patience, and the company’s patience in building a system that lets good reps do the slow work that actually lasts.
The bottle rocket goes up fast and burns out fast. If that’s still the rep you’re chasing, it’s worth asking whether you’re chasing them because they’re what the business actually needs, or just because you miss the immediate gratification the phone used to provide.
That’s a much harder question. But in a delayed-gratification profession, it’s the only one that matters.
Want to learn more about how to hire and retain the Crew that can sail this Vessel through the Waters? Make sure to attend my free webinar on August 20: “It’s Not Your Comp Plan: How to Hire, Develop, and Retain Salespeople Who Actually Perform.” Register here!
