Ya, It's Personal

The best salespeople make the process personal - because it's personal to them! Today sales trainer Tibor Shanto explains.

One of the dumbest pieces of advice sales professionals are given by bad managers or inept trainers when they lose a deal is "don't take it personally, make sure you take the lesson and move on." While I agree that we need to learn from each deal, good or bad; but not taking it personally, is not only dumb, but shows a real lack of understanding of sales. Most everyone agrees that a purchase/sale is an emotional event; that applies to both the buyer and the seller.

The best sales people are very passionate about their product and craft. This means giving the sale your all, and to do that they get involved emotionally, they know that enthusiasm is infectious and they make sure they have what it takes to infect the buyer. We have talked about this before, that all things being equal, the sales person that wins the deal is the one that really wanted it more.

The down side is that this opens the rep up to extreme emotional swings, soaring to great heights when they win a deal, and painful crash landing when they lose. So what's an enterprising sales professional to do to avoid wearing out before their time or lose their mind? The best thing they can do is have a clear step by step process, and do their utmost to adhere to it. This allows them to give every situation their full talent and energy, and recover quickly to execute their next sale.

This is not to say that they live in some fantasy world, but in sales you need to be fully engaged, which hard to do if you are not personally and emotionally involved. The question simply becomes, do you hold back to spare your emotions, or do you go full out, and in the process win more deals, and reduce the times you have to deal with the let downs.

So go ahead, your really have no choice, take it personally, get engaged, win more deals, and use that same strength of character to understand the price of success, and then move to the next opportunity to get involved.

Tibor Shanto brings over 20 years of sales experience to Renbor Sales Solutions Inc., from telemarketing to leading a global sales team focused on providing top end solutions. Tibor has helped to improve performance for sales professionals in a wide variety of fields, from financial services to on-line B2B specialists.