Sales Success Key # 1 -- Resilience

In my promised list of 10 keys to sales success there is only one item that’s comes from the realm of personal psychology. It’s pretty straight forward: resilience. Do you find you give up too easily? How low do you go when you are rejected? How quickly do you recover?

Disappointment, frustration, and hurt are built right into the job description. After all, the role of a salesperson is to influence. People often don't want to be influenced, so hearing the word ‘no’ is inevitable. As Sartre put it, “Hell is other people.” Interestingly, statistically speaking, the more you ask, the more often you get told no. Almost paradoxically, the more you get told no, the more successful you are (assuming at least a steady rate of yeses).

Resilience is critical in order to contend with the day-to-day struggles. You can have problems finding a customer, keeping a customer, and getting a customer to like you. You can be beaten by a competitor, miss sales targets, and be told your ideas or products or services simply aren't good enough. You can easily be perceived by colleagues and customers as over-promising, unrealistic, too hard, too soft. But you have to keep going or things get worse. Resilience is a necessary ingredient.

Just how resilient you are depends on a lot of factors -- things like: whom you hang around with, the frequency of letdowns, other life pressures, how you were raised, how you are compensated, your physical condition, the strength of your hopes and dreams, the negative consequences of failure, your level of pigheadness, your habits around self-soothing (e.g., babbling, bathing, buying). All these things impact your response, the duration of your recovery period, and your ability to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

But if you want more resilience and “sticktuitiveness”, where can you get it? Juicy question. Many people have spent a lot of time trying to figure that out.

Self esteem is considered a biggie. That pertains to the extent to which you believe that you are generally able to do what you set out to do, and that you are valuable or worthy, in and of yourself. People with high self esteem tend to be able to override their impulses. Accordingly, the impulse to shy away from rejection, for example, can be overcome if self esteem is high enough.

Managing your own inner monologue or self talk is another means of getting past the impulse to “go to sleep” after a letdown. Actually, what you mumble to yourself can be the cause of a negative attitude as well as a cure. For example, have you heard yourself say, “Yup, that proves it, nobody wants this stuff”? Or, “Our prices are too high,” or, “The competition is much tougher than it used to be,” or, “I’m not very good at this,” or, “I blew it,” or, “We don’t do enough marketing,” or, “There is a lack of internal support,” or, “That customer was a doinker.” Indeed, a negative inner monologue can actually create a negative emotional reaction in your own head. And slow down recovery.

But quick recovery can come from how you reframe your circumstance. Self awareness is the key to this. Recognize yourself responding to rejection. Get really familiar with how you process it. Know what you are saying to yourself, where it comes from in your past and present, exactly what triggers it. Put your finger on how your response might not be rational or might be doing you a disservice. Work hard at overriding that habitual response and replacing it with something like a clenched fist, flexed arm muscles and, in your own private, whacky way, declaring to the universe, “Whoooaa.”

To some extent we’re talking about getting oneself reoriented. For example, when you overcome an impulse (and, in so doing, either manifest or elevate your self esteem), you are essentially reorienting. When you manage your self-talk, you are reorienting. When you talk to your boss after some misfortune, hopefully her leadership reorients you in some way.

Or even change the whole darned paradigm. That’s reorienting at its best. One of the biggest things I’ve learned about mental health or emotional savvy is that one can’t free oneself from negative feelings; but one can either manage one’s life such that hurt is less likely to be the result, or one can try to see things differently.

One of my favorite examples of reorienting is a trick I learned from a group of life insurance sales reps I trained 20 years ago. It was about handling the slings and arrows of cold calling and was called the paperclip technique. It’s pretty much an industrial age kind of thing, but that’s how darned old I am.

If you have to call 100 people today, then make a pile of 100 paperclips right in front of your phone. The goal? Move the pile 12 inches over to the right -- one paperclip at a time. One for each dial. “Hello, Mr. Smith, got a minute? No? No problem. Have a good day”. Click. Move a clip. Next call. Next clip. Watch your pile move. Stop when you’ve reached your goal. It’s about moving the paperclips, not about getting rejected.

Get it? It’s not about you.