When everything fails in sales, what to do?

In sales, we often run into situations where everything around us falls apart, and nothing works.

We call customers, and they don’t answer.

We try to set up meetings, and nothing.

Our list of current proposals gets shorter and shorter.

And before long, we start looking through the job ad sections to see who is recruiting salespeople.

Only those who have never sold don’t know what a sales gap is.

Going two or three months without results is one of the worst things to happen to a salesperson.

Despair begins to set in, and often we let it get us down and make us worse and worse.

It’s easy in sales training to talk about motivation, dynamism and going for it, but only those who, like me and many others, have gone through a sales career can give importance to this fact.

One of the reasons why at Results Driven, we only work with trainers with substantial field experience in sales is precisely this.

You must have been there to value details that sometimes make all the difference.

Of course, this allows us to have a much more significant impact on the sales teams we train and coach since they understand that there is someone ahead of them who has already been through what they are going through at the moment.

One of the problems of voids in sales is that customers often perceive something needs to be corrected while the salesperson is still entering their office.

His body language, attitude, and other signs indicate to him, although often only instinctively and at a subconscious level, that something is not correct.

The problem is that the customer needs to know if the salesperson is below the line because the market is down, the product is no good, or the service doesn’t meet expectations.

Anything can cross the customer’s mind.

Many salespeople today go out on the street defeated at the start of the sale. One of the things we teach in our training, which has had great success, is the issue of emotional control in selling.

These are simple things in practice, but they can make a difference daily in the field.

When we go into the client’s office, we must remember that everything is fine.

In other words, pretend that the sale is a theater and that we are taking on the role of a successful salesperson.

One of the tricks I often teach in my courses is, still in the car and before the meeting, to close your eyes and select in your memory a time when your sales were fantastic and when everything was going well.

If you didn’t have a time when your sales were fantastic, think of other things in your personal life when you were successful.

Analyze your memory as if you were living the experience again. See what you saw then, what you said to yourself or were told, what you felt, what smells were in the air.

In short, make the memory as sensorily rich as possible.

Now do a little mental exercise and, depending on what is in your mind at the moment – it can be images, sounds, or sensations – bring it closer to you.

Make it bigger with more color and intensity if it is an image.

If it’s a sound, make it closer.

If it’s a sensation, feel it growing inside you and intensifying.

You may not feel anything, but you may also, like most people, think that all the emotion that came from reliving your moment of success intensifies and that all this makes a smile appear on your lips, and you experience some of that success again.

Open your eyes and sell!

By working emotion in this way, we can focus on something positive in the sale and often diminish the negative emotional responses that our customers sniff in the air without us realizing it.

This is just one of the techniques that exist in this area.

It may seem simple.

But sometimes the simplest things are the most valuable things in selling and our lives.

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Also published on Medium.