What baseball taught me about B2B sales

Sometime between Labour Day and Canadian Thanksgiving I jumped timelines and now I’m an avid baseball fan who never misses a Blue Jays game. (Toronto/Canadian friends know!)

Here’s the remarkable thing about watching a lot of baseball: you start to notice things go wrong way more often than they go right.

A pretty good pro baseball player might get to first base only 30% of the time they’re up to bat. Home plate? Maybe once every four or five games.

Over a 160-game season, that’s a whole lot of strikeouts and missed swings. Even when they connect, it’s just as likely to be a foul or an easy out.

This is what makes baseball exciting.

You can be the best player in the league, making half a billion dollars, and the odds are still stacked against you. The only way to be great — to hit a home run or even just get on base — is to swing the bat.

At the risk of sounding like a LinkedIn guru writing broetry…

All this baseball has me thinking about failure. Or more accurately, the fear of failure and how it shows up when you’re running a creative small biz.

I know how many times the fear of striking out has kept me from stepping up over the past three years… not to mention all the years before I dared to take the leap and start Slow & Steady.

And believe me, I’m still learning to swing even if I've run a few innings myself.

I’m certainly not the only one, either. With the Decelerator’s first cohort up and running, we’ve already had so many conversations about fear — and how it keeps us stuck, tweaking our websites into oblivion instead of just launching the damn thing already.

Maybe that sounds familiar?

If you’re nodding along, thinking about your own endless edit cycles, take a page from the baseball playbook.

Aim for that 30%. Strike out. Try again in the next inning. You never know — you might just hit a grand slam.

Until next time, GO BLUE JAYS! ⚾️

Amanda Laird ​
Growth Marketing Strategist
Founder, Slow & Steady Studio

PS: Speaking of the Decelerator, next week I'm going to share lessons from launching my first group cohort.

In the meantime, what kind of behind-the-scenes tea would you love most? Metrics, mindset, launch lessons? Hit reply and tell me -- I'll make sure to spill the good stuff.

Tabs I kept open all week

If you like getting into other people's business, you'll love the Great Subject Line Experiment from my friend Nicole Cloutier at Copy Poetics: real data from 28 creative businesses (including me!) on the subject lines that are actually getting opened.

Join the Remembership before doors close tonight! Nature-based nervous system support and intuitive integration from the lovely Rachael Amber. 💖

Anti-diet eating takes effort (and that's okay). I loved this post from Slowpoke Amber Hanson, anti-diet nutritionist and intuitive eating counselor.

And what it's like being a small business right now.

Work With Slow & Steady

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Here's how I'm currently working with clients:

🗺️ Strategy Roadmap: audit & assess where you're at, and where to go next

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