Dealing with Rejection, Motivation, Sales Success, Successtags: achieving success, dealing with failure, dealing with rejection, don't quit, perseverance, persistence, success, success factors
Feb
21
I came across this poem more than 10 years and still enjoy reading it. I hope you enjoy it.
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the roads you’re trudging seem all uphill,
When the funds are low and debts are high,
And you want to smile but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down quite a bit
Rest if you must, but don’t quit.
For life is queer with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure runs about,
When he might have won if he’d stuck it out.
Success is just failure turned inside out,
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far.
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit,
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit!
-Anonymous-
You can download a printable version of this poem here.
Last week I wrote a post about an encounter with a car door that left me with a black eye. Fortunately, my eye has healed quite quickly and is almost back to normal.
Unfortunately, for some sales people, recuperating from a lost deal can take much longer.
I always find it fascinating when sales reps talk about the deals they lost or the challenging customers they have dealt with even though those situations occurred many months earlier. In fact, I have heard sales people complain about a lost sale as much as a year or two later!
Get over it!
- It doesn’t matter if your competition undercut your price by 18 percent.
- It doesn’t matter that your prospect didn’t see the value in your offering.
- It doesn’t matter that you needed that sale to reach your quota.
- It doesn’t matter that your competitor out-performed or out-maneuvered you.
- It doesn’t matter that your prospect changed her mind.
What matters is how quickly you heal and get past that failure.
Failure is part of the equation when you sell for a living. No one likes to lose a deal but it is next to impossible to close 100 percent of the sales opportunities that come your way.
Too many sales people spend too much time talking about the “big one that got away”. You may enjoy lamenting the fact that a prospect gave you his word only to cancel the deal a few days later. But this type of behaviour does not offer any positive benefits.
Unless…
You objectively critique and analyze YOUR performance. What could you have done better? What did you miss or forget to do? What factors in your control did you mismanage?
If you did everything you could to secure that deal but it slipped sideways or fell off the rails, then chalk it up and move on.
Stop thinking, complaining, and griping about it.
Heal thyself and move on!
