If I had to choose one thing that seriously affects the performance of the average seller I would definitely choose those all too familiar “Selling Blues”
It’s just inevitable that sales people will have days when things just don’t go to plan. Customers will cancel appointments, heavy traffic delays meetings, clients will complain about something and I’m sure you can think of many more examples. We aren’t robots so for most of us this will affect our mood. Unfortunately for sales figures this state of mind doesn’t last for seconds or minutes either. In fact, it seems to carry on for the entire working day. We try our best to reverse the process but more often than not our efforts are in vain.
So what can we do to beat those selling blues? Well believe it or not there are solutions to this curse of a problem. Firstly we must re-educate our subconscious mind to return to the positive state it was in before all those negative events occurred. How do we this is the million dollar question? Well, the answer is rather simple really! We must condition and in a sense “brainwash” ourselves with repeated phrases and keywords. These positive words and phrases should generally be natural to our every day vocabulary and not “artificial sounding” We should repeat positive words like "wonderful" and "incredible" even though we don't feel them in our heart of hearts.
Another technique that works well for me is to focus my mind back to a really positive moment that brings back great memories. Keep thinking about it or write it down on a piece of paper and keep this going for a few minutes and hopefully you will be able to shake off those blues.
“Selling Blues” can also be a real problem for Sales Managers or “Motivators” because an entire team can also be affected in this way. If you look back to your school days you’ll remember that every classroom of students has “leaders” and “influencers” If these people are having a bad day at the office they tend to “spread the bad news” to just about everybody who is willing to listen to them. Everyone joins in with the chorus and suddenly the job is terrible, the company is terrible and the manager sucks. Reversing this process is more of an uphill struggle because you may be dealing with ten or twenty people. Shaking the blues off twenty people can almost be an impossible task unless the “leaders” and “influencers” are pacified and contented.
Returning back to the case of the individual suffering from Sales Blues it has to be said that you need imagination to stop this cycle and it can differ quite a lot from one person to the next. The problem is that most people do absolutely nothing about their state of mind and just accept it.
I personally like to adjust my environment for a while when I find myself in this type of dilema. I’ll go for a walk outside and get some fresh air. I might go and treat myself to something special to eat or buy myself a small gift that will lift my spirit. Colours and odours can be very useful when buying small gifts because they too can be uplifting and refreshing. I hope some of my suggestions will help you to beat those selling blues!
This article was written by Sales Expert and Sales Course Creator David Lynch who has written many books such as “Making The Seller” and “39 Mistakes to Avoid in Sales” He offers lots of valuable FREE sales tips on his website
www.makingtheseller.com