Abraham Lincoln is often used as proof that persistence wins.
It’s a comfortable explanation. Because it makes success linear. But that’s rarely how it works.
Lincoln didn’t move from failure to success in a straight line. He moved through a political system that was constantly changing around him.
Sometimes his position aligned. Sometimes it didn’t. Same person. Different outcomes.
Persistence matters less than we like to think. It’s a story we prefer because it feels controllable.
But results are rarely determined by the will to keep going. They’re determined by how well your position fits the process you’re entering.
In sales, we make the same mistake.
We train on how to present the solution. Rarely on how to understand the situation we’re walking into.
The meeting matters. But what determines the meeting is often decided before you walk into the room.
The important things have already happened.
Someone has defined the problem. Someone has set the reference point. Someone has decided what “good” means.
Often without you in the room.
And by the time you arrive… much is already decided.
A no is rarely a no to your solution. It’s a marker. A coordinate in an already ongoing decision process.
That’s why two salespeople can say exactly the same thing and get completely different outcomes.
It’s not about what they said. It’s about where they entered the process.
Upstream Selling is about one thing: understanding the situation you’re walking into, before you try to change it.
It’s rarely the execution that fails. It’s the reading of the situation.
Most people ask why they lost. Fewer ask where they were in the process when it happened.
Take your last lost deal. And be brutally honest:
Were you first in the customer’s mind? Or were you thinking primarily about your own offering?
That question almost always divides people into two groups.
Those who think it’s about a better offering. And those who begin to suspect the offering was never the problem.
If the answer is uncomfortable, it’s probably correct.
We built a diagnostic tool for exactly that insight.
Five minutes. No registration. No data stored.
