Coping With Adversity
Coping With Adversity is something that is necessary when it comes to achieving success.
Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world so it is no great surprise that from time to time the law of averages do work against us.
When this happens if you have been closing say one out of four of your presentations you may suddenly go sixteen presentations in a row and come up empty. It happens to everybody at some point in time. Because it is just a mathematical probability and not something you are doing wrong.
I suggest you just work your way through the situation.
It has happen to me from time to time and at times it was way more than any sixteen presentations between sales.
No, we do not sell at every home or business where we make a presentation and there is no magic formula where you are going to sell a certain percentage of your presentations. You are going to miss a few and then sell a few but you can look back over a month and get a pretty good average of your accomplishments.
By paying attention to all of the details and not giving up during the close I managed to always have a decent closing average but I like everyone else would get into a slump now and then. What saved me was this. I figured out early in my career that it was not necessarily me that was at fault. Sometimes you are calling on people with no desire or need for your product and you cannot develop the desire or the want to in the prospect for the product.
You may have also ran a cross a prospect or two that does not have the resources to buy the product. If you hit a bunch of these situations in a row you are in a slump but it is not really your fault.
What you have to do is work your way out of slumps. Keep working as hard as you can and get back to the basics so that when you have a good qualified prospect with the means to buy, you will be able to convince the prospect to make the purchase.
As a sales manager I often found that when an agent went into a slump situation they would think it was their fault and so they started tweaking the presentation and this made the slump worse because they were missing the few sales they were coming across. So the best advice I can give is this; as I said, get back to the basics so you make the sales you need to be making.
Other things can happen as well. I remember one time when I was on a road trip with this other fellow and we ran twenty one leads in a row where the prospect had passed away a way just a day or two before we came by their home. Twenty one is a big number but guess what happened when we pulled up to house number twenty two.
There were about thirty cars at the home and all kinds of well dressed people sitting on the porch or out in the yard visiting and talking. Guess what I thought was going on, especially as it was the middle of the week?
I had only been to twenty one previous houses in a row over the last two days where the situation was exact ally the same. I told my partner to wait in the car and I would go check the situation out. I could not believe this had happened to me twenty two times in a row.
As I walked up to the house I stopped and asked a couple of the people in the yard if this was the right residence and if Mr. or Mrs. so and so were home?
I nearly passed out when they gave me the answer because they said that both prospects were home.
I went on up to the house and met with the lady of the house and she said one of her neighbors had passed away and they were having kind of a after the funeral dinner for them. She told me I could stop by after the dinner was over about seven in the evening.
I tried not to look too overjoyed as I left due to the situation at hand but I did feel GREAT!!!
Never again in my entire sales career did any thing like that every happen to me again. But it is the old story stuff happens, another one from the book of Murphy’s Law in other words.
While things like this do happen from time to time it does not mean it is the end of the world. There is a good cure for these situations when they come up.
Most of these situations come about because the law of probability is not working in your favor and you have to learn to suck it up and work your way through the problem.
I have seen a lot of cases over the years where a salesperson is going through a situation like this and the salesperson starts changing the presentation or his prospecting methods and prolongs the agony. I say that because the salesperson took something that had been working and changed it to something that does not work.
The truth is though, if instead you kept on trying, things will eventually swing back in your favor.
How to cope with adversity and temporary set backs is a subject that comes up more often than we would like. But it is just a matter of meeting your situations head on and you will come up with the answers.
The only people who loose in these situations are the ones who give up and take other jobs because they cannot see any light at the other end of the tunnel.
So put your thinking cap on and figure out what you need to be doing and go to work and take care of your problems, one at a time. It works every time. (If you work to!)
Thank you,
Billy J Gibson
Thesellingfoolbjg@yahoo.com
http://www.thesellingfool.com
Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world so it is no great surprise that from time to time the law of averages do work against us.
When this happens if you have been closing say one out of four of your presentations you may suddenly go sixteen presentations in a row and come up empty. It happens to everybody at some point in time. Because it is just a mathematical probability and not something you are doing wrong.
I suggest you just work your way through the situation.
It has happen to me from time to time and at times it was way more than any sixteen presentations between sales.
No, we do not sell at every home or business where we make a presentation and there is no magic formula where you are going to sell a certain percentage of your presentations. You are going to miss a few and then sell a few but you can look back over a month and get a pretty good average of your accomplishments.
By paying attention to all of the details and not giving up during the close I managed to always have a decent closing average but I like everyone else would get into a slump now and then. What saved me was this. I figured out early in my career that it was not necessarily me that was at fault. Sometimes you are calling on people with no desire or need for your product and you cannot develop the desire or the want to in the prospect for the product.
You may have also ran a cross a prospect or two that does not have the resources to buy the product. If you hit a bunch of these situations in a row you are in a slump but it is not really your fault.
What you have to do is work your way out of slumps. Keep working as hard as you can and get back to the basics so that when you have a good qualified prospect with the means to buy, you will be able to convince the prospect to make the purchase.
As a sales manager I often found that when an agent went into a slump situation they would think it was their fault and so they started tweaking the presentation and this made the slump worse because they were missing the few sales they were coming across. So the best advice I can give is this; as I said, get back to the basics so you make the sales you need to be making.
Other things can happen as well. I remember one time when I was on a road trip with this other fellow and we ran twenty one leads in a row where the prospect had passed away a way just a day or two before we came by their home. Twenty one is a big number but guess what happened when we pulled up to house number twenty two.
There were about thirty cars at the home and all kinds of well dressed people sitting on the porch or out in the yard visiting and talking. Guess what I thought was going on, especially as it was the middle of the week?
I had only been to twenty one previous houses in a row over the last two days where the situation was exact ally the same. I told my partner to wait in the car and I would go check the situation out. I could not believe this had happened to me twenty two times in a row.
As I walked up to the house I stopped and asked a couple of the people in the yard if this was the right residence and if Mr. or Mrs. so and so were home?
I nearly passed out when they gave me the answer because they said that both prospects were home.
I went on up to the house and met with the lady of the house and she said one of her neighbors had passed away and they were having kind of a after the funeral dinner for them. She told me I could stop by after the dinner was over about seven in the evening.
I tried not to look too overjoyed as I left due to the situation at hand but I did feel GREAT!!!
Never again in my entire sales career did any thing like that every happen to me again. But it is the old story stuff happens, another one from the book of Murphy’s Law in other words.
While things like this do happen from time to time it does not mean it is the end of the world. There is a good cure for these situations when they come up.
Most of these situations come about because the law of probability is not working in your favor and you have to learn to suck it up and work your way through the problem.
I have seen a lot of cases over the years where a salesperson is going through a situation like this and the salesperson starts changing the presentation or his prospecting methods and prolongs the agony. I say that because the salesperson took something that had been working and changed it to something that does not work.
The truth is though, if instead you kept on trying, things will eventually swing back in your favor.
How to cope with adversity and temporary set backs is a subject that comes up more often than we would like. But it is just a matter of meeting your situations head on and you will come up with the answers.
The only people who loose in these situations are the ones who give up and take other jobs because they cannot see any light at the other end of the tunnel.
So put your thinking cap on and figure out what you need to be doing and go to work and take care of your problems, one at a time. It works every time. (If you work to!)
Thank you,
Billy J Gibson
Thesellingfoolbjg@yahoo.com
http://www.thesellingfool.com
posted by thesellingfool | 6:32 PM
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