In the world of baseball, power hitters are usually the most exciting players to watch. These are the guys that can knock the ball out of the park, creating those iconic, inspirational and game-changing moments. The power hitters are usually remembered as heroes, wowing the stadium crowds and living on for decades in the highlight reels.

But here’s the thing about those big home run hitters: They usually have a high strikeout percentage, too. In fact, those epic homers rarely decide a game. It’s the less-than-thrilling base hits that put runs on the scoreboard.

The same is also true in the business world, and particularly in sales. It’s tempting to go after the big score, and to focus on landing that one big client or customer. The problem is that it’s just not a reliable or sustainable way to grow a business.

This isn’t to say that having dramatic success — hitting those game-changing home runs — requires an all-or-nothing approach. It’s more that you really can’t plan the day-to-day growth of your business around knocking every ball out of the park. It’s one thing to be ambitious. It’s another thing to build your current year’s sales projections around unrealistic and unattainable projections.

You can certainly “project” that you will be able to get meetings with 100 of the Fortune 500 companies in the next two months, even though you don’t have a single contact at any of them. You can “project” that you’ll get at least a dozen of those giant companies to sign a six-figure deal with you before the end of the quarter. While you’re at it, you may as well “project” having a few million in new investment thanks to that lottery ticket you just bought.

Wishful thinking and daydreaming don’t have a place in the data-driven reality of sales forecasts and performance. It’s not that home runs can’t happen in business — they do all the time — but they’re exceptional events and statistical outliers. If your business plan is built around these kinds of sales happening, you’re likely fooling yourself.

To stick with the baseball analogy, it’s better to build your business around consistently getting those singles and doubles that slowly result in gaining runs. These aren’t home run moments, they’re just the day-to-day stuff of growing a real-world business through sales. If you can develop realistic projections, and to hit those numbers reliably, your profits will be far more stable over the long term.

Having a profitable mindset isn’t about the home runs. It isn’t about having those miracle, “Hail Mary pass” moments (to switch up my sports metaphors) that bring in money just as you’re getting desperate. For every story of business that went from tiny startup to booming success after landing a few big clients, there are hundreds of stories of businesses that died because they didn’t focus on building a scalable, predictable sales process or put in the work to generate reliable cash flow.

Long-term success is about creating a clear path to profitability, giving your sales everything you’ve got, bootstrapping for as long as you can, and forecasting and verifying your performance. If you want real success, don’t bet your business on having those home run moments. Build a business where every member of your team is reliably getting on base.