Get up, get on, get over it already!

Sales is a funny vocation, one minute you´re on top of the world, the next it´s crashing around your ears! Every year I meet thousands of sales professionals in my sales training seminars so I really do see the good, the bad and the downright lazy! As my mum likes to say, "It takes alsorts!" It´s not my job to judge salespeople nor is it my job to chastise them! My job is to motivate them, inspire them and educate them. With some this means teaching them everything from the basics up, with others it´s more a case of fine tuning, you know, a bit like your tv going on the blink!

I was thinking about this the other day and about a good friend of mine. My friend had been an incredibly successful salesperson. He set up a business with another friend of mine and together they really made some waves. They had a passion for their business and a passion for selling. Just being with them was a delight. They had swanky offices, prestigious cars and money to spend. They were in their late 20’s. Things could not be brighter.

And you know, isn´t that just when life comes and jumps on you.

First off the two of them started to work on different projects and gradually moved apart. Eventually they both went different ways. Our hero stayed with the business and ran it by himself but, as a complementary team, there were areas of the business that he had never really been involved with.

He lost it.

The business went. The cars went. The cash went. The self esteem went. To try and bail himself out he got a job working for another sales organization and tried to sell but even his sales skills seemed to have abondoned him! He had, it seemed, blown it.

But this is the beatiful thing about sales and selling, every dawn brings with it a brand new day. My friend picked himself up from his worst year since he started working, he reassessed his skills and his strengths and he got himself a job where he had the products, the back up and the support on which he could capitalise. The very next year he sold fractionally short of 1 million pounds worth of services and put himself back into the elite of his chosen field.

Hero to Zero and back to Hero on the turn of a button!

Sales training moral of the day… No matter what happens to you, remember that you´re always one step closer to your next sale! Luck never spreads itself evenly but if you´re in the middle of a dry patch and you´re still doing all the right stuff, a nub of butter and jam is just around the corner!

If things aren’t going quite how you would like, if your morale has taken a hit, if it seems that you just can´t close a wide open barn door… remember…

Review your mindset and your skills, get back to basics and focus on activity. Make sure that you are still playing the sales game full on. As some wise person once said, you have to be in it to win it!