The Best Salespeople Train Like Elite Athletes

People often ask me what elite salespeople have in common. The answer usually surprises them. It isn’t charisma. It isn’t intelligence. It isn’t even natural talent. 

The greatest salespeople I’ve ever known have far more in common with Olympic athletes than they do with the stereotypical image of a salesperson. Both understand something that most people never fully appreciate: Extraordinary results are almost always the product of extraordinarily ordinary habits.

Watch an elite athlete train. A hockey player will take the same shot hundreds of times. A golfer will hit thousands of nearly identical putts. A swimmer will repeat the same stroke over and over, making adjustments so subtle that no spectator would ever notice. 

None of those repetitions is exciting. None make the highlight reel. Yet every championship is built on them. The performance everyone applauds is simply the visible result of countless hours spent doing things that appeared completely ordinary.

Sales works exactly the same way. Every prospecting call is a repetition. Every owner meeting is a repetition. Every follow-up email is a repetition. Every market analysis is a repetition. Every difficult conversation is a repetition. 

Most people look at a top producer’s career and see the closings. They don’t see the thousands of conversations, the countless hours of preparation, the years of learning, and the relentless consistency that made those closings almost inevitable. We celebrate the 100th blow that splits the rock while ignoring the 99 that came before it. But those first 99 blows weren’t failures. They were transformation. The miracle wasn’t that the rock finally split. The miracle was that the person swinging the hammer had become capable of splitting it.

When I speak to audiences, I often ask a simple question: “How many of you have a savings account?” Almost every hand goes up. Everyone understands compound interest financially. Yet very few people ever apply that same principle to their own lives. 

Every workout is a deposit. Every prospecting call is a deposit. Every property tour is a deposit. Every book you read is a deposit. Every difficult conversation you choose to have instead of avoiding is another deposit. 

None of those individual deposits feels significant on the day you make them. Just as placing $10 into a savings account doesn’t feel life-changing, one workout won’t transform your body and one prospecting call won’t transform your career. Compound interest was never designed to impress you today. It was designed to reward consistency over time. 

Life works exactly the same way. The “spectacular” is simply the accumulated interest on thousands of ordinary deposits.

I don’t believe elite performers necessarily enjoy doing difficult things more than everyone else. I think they’ve simply learned to love the process that difficult things require. Elite athletes don’t wake up every morning excited to train. Elite salespeople don’t wake up every morning hoping to hear “no.” But they understand that discipline always comes before performance. They know that the scoreboard merely reports what happened during practice. The championship isn’t won on game day. The sale isn’t won when the contract is signed. Those moments are simply the public confirmation of private habits that have been repeated for years.

Over the past 42 years, I’ve sold more than 2,417 buildings throughout New York City. People sometimes assume that those results came from extraordinary ability. They didn’t. They came from ordinary behaviors repeated thousands upon thousands of times. 

Making one more call. Reading one more zoning document. Walking one more neighborhood. Meeting one more owner. Showing up the next day and doing it again. Learning from one more mistake. Success was never built on one extraordinary effort. It was built on the quiet discipline of making another deposit every single day.

Today, our culture has become obsessed with shortcuts. Everyone wants the hack, the secret, or the breakthrough that will produce extraordinary results overnight. Elite performers think differently. They aren’t searching for breakthroughs. They are searching for better habits. They understand that you don’t become exceptional by occasionally doing exceptional things. You become exceptional by consistently doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. 

Athletes understand this instinctively. The best salespeople do, too.

In the end, elite salespeople aren’t playing different games, but they’re following exactly the same formula. They keep making the deposits. They trust the power of compound interest. They keep pounding the rock. And, one day, what the world calls an extraordinary achievement is simply the accumulated result of thousands of ordinary days done well.

Robert Knakal is founder, chairman and CEO of BK Real Estate Advisors.