Dealing with Adversity

If you haven’t gone through some adversity in sales, in terms of a period in time when you were not performing at peak you probably haven’t been doing it long enough.

So when you go through that period of difficultly and drought, when the numbers are lower than you expect - there’s a couple of things to remember:

You can’t get paralyzed by the state you are in. You’ve got to keep pushing forward even if the results aren’t what you expected.

Like a hockey player who’s not scoring, you go back to practicing harder and to the fundamentals. They don’t stop or get paralyzed to play. They actually keep going, and go back to the fundamentals

The thing we always find is that when we talk to the sales person that’s having a tough time, they’ll say “listen I’m doing everything exactly the same as I’ve always done it" And sometimes they get a second set of eyes for whether its call recordings for live call listening, they will find that they are not.

Fate doesn’t play a role in professional B2B selling.

If your results are dropping, typically you are doing something differently. Now it may not be evident to you when you are doing it. It’s very hard to self-diagnose in the moment but what you may want to do is record a couple of calls on your telephone while you’re doing them and share them with your manager or your peers and say “I’m looking for a second set of eyes on whats taking place here today.”

So when things get difficult just persevere and stick to the fundamentals. Make the number of calls, do the research before the call. Have a point of interest for who you are calling, understand the company they work for and make sure you’ve looked them up on Linkedin.

Make sure you have a structure for that call and are trying to progress it.