Having a though selling time? Don′t Panic!

When you hear "though selling time", there are many things that might come to your mind... being far away from your budget, loosing customer trust, not enough internal support to excel with the customer, budget cuts for T&E that will affect your customer face time, your competitors with a better solution or product, not able to close a deal due to lack of quality, external factors, economy, etc.

There is almost no salesperson that has not passed through a though selling time, and, as always in sales, when you are not reaching your objectives, the pressure keeps increasing by the minute and, as the due date for your ending period gets closer, it seems that you alternatives and chances are limited and fewer.

When this happens, regardless of the situations, there are few things that you need to have in mind:

Don′t′s:

• Don′t Panic!: The worst and less useful thing you can do is to panic, this will lead you to even more chaos, it is important to get you mind cool in order to think as well as understand where and why you are standing where you are. 
• Don′t blame others!: When people is under pressure, we tend to do finger pointing to the people around us, this for sure will lead us to an unsuccessful ending. This action will only increase the gap between the areas that we need with us! On the opposite, we need to think how to leverage our teammates and making them part of the solution
• Don′t give away your work!: Desperate measures might lead you to throw away months of work from you and your team, it is very important to combine our short term pressure with our long term view. Sometimes people "give away" solutions that were already "bought" by the customer and it is just a matter of time to get the proper reward!
• Don′t give up!: The worst thing you can do is to give up, if your confidence is lost, your chances of success are zero. What you believe is what will happen!

DO′s

• Review your strategy!: Make sure you go back and review if you are aligned with your strategy, understand if there are things unexpected or that are strong enough to make some adjustments.
• Stick to your plans!: If you are convinced that your plans and strategy are the proper ones, then stick to it!! A baby takes 9 months to born!, you have to give time for things to happen. With the pressure, you may feel tempted to change resources or focus, so keep in mind your vision and make sure you maintain the path.
• Focus, Focus, Focus!: Look forward and be laser focus on all your actions, make sure that every action you make, has a direct impact in what you are aiming for, sometimes when we are on chaos, we might tend to divert on what we do and loose focus. Time is precious!
• Leverage your teammates!: In most of the companies, you are not alone!, make sure you involve and leverage your colleagues or your partners, they are very valuables resources. Generally if you are successful, they also will be!
• Ask for help!: Don′t feel embarrassed by asking for help to you peers or boss, sometimes a fresh point of view can have a different perspective that can open you new leads to move forward!

This do′s and don′t′s might not sound as rocket science, but when you are in challenging times you need to think, make sure you are doing what makes sense, be creative and never loose your confidence, remember, though times never last, though people do, .... so Don′t Panic and move forward!!