Why Wrestlers Make Great Sellers

This weekend, I will be going to the NCAA Wrestling Tournament in Philadelphia with some of my friends. I have been attending the tournament fairly regularly over the last fifteen years and it has taken me to all different parts of the USA, like Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, Tulsa, and New York City. 

I was so-so as a wrestler. I grew up in New England, which is not really a hotbed for wrestling. It is instead quite a hotbed for hockey and basketball talent, so generally speaking, it was not the best athletes who wound up wrestling in the region. Moreover, I started in seventh grade, and most great wrestlers get their start when they are four or five years old. All this to say, while I had a relatively good career in my region, I was a walk-on at Princeton’s Division 1 program and got my butt kicked for the two seasons that I wrestled in college.

Because I know firsthand how hard wrestling is, I have a tremendous admiration for those who have the discipline, willpower and skill to succeed in the sport. Collegiate wrestling is a whole different animal entirely. In addition to cutting tremendous amounts of weight, you need to be up early every morning for two-a-day workouts that are of the utmost intensity. And wrestling is a very unforgiving sport.

When I was graduating from college, I was a bit lost as to what I wanted to do with myself for a career. While most of the precocious kids I went to school with on any Ivy League campus seemingly came out of the womb knowing that they wanted to be doctors, lawyers, consultants, or Wall Street bankers, I was a bit all over the place. I interviewed for teaching jobs and had several offers to teach English and coach wrestling for prep schools in the US. I got a job offer to work for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which seemed pretty cool as I liked baseball and I had previously interned for the Boston Red Sox. But none of these opportunities really struck me like the one sales job I took right out of school.

I remember when I was scrolling the job postings, I saw a sentence that read, “The harder you work, the more money you’ll make.” This really appealed to me. Of course, like anyone else, I was (and still am) financially motivated. Anyone who tells you that they are not is a liar. But it was not the idea of making lots of money that motivated me. It was the notion that it was up to me to draw the lines to my wallet myself. I liked the agency of sales. If I succeeded, the sky was limitless. And if I failed, it was my fault.

For me, I believe this is the strongest parallel between sales and wrestling, and it is why I love hiring wrestlers as sellers. By the way, it does not just need to be wrestlers. You can think of other individual sports, like swimming for example. Swimming is a grueling sport, just like wrestling, and the key distinction is really just that you are not in true physical battle with another human being, nor are you cutting all of the weight.

This is not to say that people who play team sports are losers. On the contrary, people who play team sports have to make all of the same sacrifices, and they probably know a thing or two about how to play well in the sandbox with others. I am merely stating that those who play “individual” sports have the ultimate pressure of carrying the proverbial ball in their hands. And that is not an easy mental load to carry. It is no different in sales where you carry a quota and your ability to hit that quota is largely up to your own strategy and work ethic.

While the individuality of sales is similar to the sport of wrestling, I think the ultimate tie between the two comes in the form of failure. In most industries, a 30% close rate would be considered to be very good. What this means is that even the best sellers are failing about 70% of the time. And this does not even include the failures they have beforehand. For example, it can take 50 to 100 cold calls in order to book a single meeting. There is a lot of rejection on the path to even obtaining a qualified opportunity. And even then, the best sellers might succeed about 30% of the time after spending dozens of hours of time and effort with each account to try to get to the finish line.

Wrestling taught me how to deal with failure. The technique needs to be practiced and drilled constantly in order to be perfected. And yet, no matter how hard you try, there is always something greater and more aspirational than whatever you have achieved. I think it is the ultimate battle of wills between two people. When you fail, everyone sees it. At least in a team sport like soccer or basketball, you have several other teammates who share the limelight in a time of failure.

What this means for wrestlers is that they are constantly looking for ways to get better. They view failure as a medium for growth. The same is true for the best sellers. With every opportunity they lose, they seek to understand why. In fact, the best sellers will go to the customer and get their candid feedback on what they could have done differently. 

For all of these reasons, I see a lot of parallels between sales and the sport of wrestling. This is why wrestlers can be some of your best salespeople. They don’t quit, and they view the pain as part of the process.