The morning dark gloom of heavy ponderous rain clouds, piling snow drifts or driving, cutting razor blade sleet can have a serious impact on our sales mood. We may be thinking to ourselves, “what a lousy day to have run around town juggling umbrellas, trains, taxis and bags of samples to visit clients”. The next day, the rains have departed. Brilliant azure blue skies and a friendly warm sun seem to say “what a beautiful day to make sales calls”. Neither comment is acceptable for the pro salesperson, because sales masters are not randomly controlled by the inequities of the weather.
These are not the only barbarous mood bear traps we need to look out for. Does your mood of the moment impact completing unpalatable tasks or conversely do they in turn impact your mood? That proposal you have to get out, but don’t want to start because it is time consuming, complex and difficult. You reel back, you move away from the pain, because you may even have to think! Doing the CRM, which you consider a major time waster, feels slow, laborious and boring and to you is a lower priority item. Ironically, you later whine about the lack of leads from the marketing effort, but your moodiness meant you didn’t help with the needed CRM inputs did you?
Where is your sales discipline for doing all the dull bits of the work? A coffee break, a catch up on email, posting something on your business social media, etc., all look a lot more appealing than facing this piece of tedium. The sales pro doesn’t put the reward first. They put the task completion ahead of the reward. They don’t stand in front of the empty fireplace bellowing about what they want – heat. They put the logs in there first and then they light the fire. They understand the natural order of the sales universe. How about you?
What about when buyers let you down? You find out they went with a competitor when you thought it was in the bag, they cancelled their order due to headquarter’s spending constraints or unexpectedly reduced the size of their purchase. Your champion working for this company has been sidelined internally, but you don’t know about that. All you understand is that the next phase in the sales conversation has mysteriously not progressed, you cannot reach anyone and you cannot fathom why.
Just to really top it off, you have already spent the money from the expected commissions. Whoops, hero to zero in two seconds. What is the impact on your self-esteem, your fighting spirit, your motivation? In the rollercoaster of the sale’s life, we are now in the terrifying “nosedive” stage of the process, a white knuckle ride, without any sign of probable relief.
Living an intentional life means controlling both the head and the heart. The bigger picture makes the bump and grind of the everyday palatable, because there is a higher purpose in our life. If we are dedicated to serving clients, then we can absorb the fluctuations in the weather, the unreliability of people, the changing fortunes of the market, the gross unfairness of the sale life. The size of our WHY in the fight makes all the difference.
What if we don’t have a strong WHY or a strong enough WHY? Well, that is going to mean trouble. We better deduce, distill, select or create one. No WHY and sales gets real hard, real fast, real often. Sit down and think about what you want to do, what you need to do and what you wish you could do. Twenty minutes on this type of introspection will soon identify some key drivers for you. Rank them into priority order, start at the top and attach timelines to their achievement. Break them down into smaller pieces, smaller projects and then get going working them. Review the goals frequently, review your work advancement and mini-celebrate even small progress. Most importantly of all – keep going regardless.
If we decide we will alone will determine our mood, our feelings, our orientation and not let externalities invade our moods, we can keep doing what we need to be doing, when we need to be doing it. We won’t be running for cover, trying to find a million other things more appealing to do, than this dull task in front of us. We need to keep reconnecting with our WHY and see our activities like a calling, where we can help people. As Zig Ziglar, the great sales coach mentioned, helping others is how you ultimately help yourself and sales being a numbers game, the more people you help, the better you will do.
Our mood control in sales is a critical function of our sustained and consistent success. The stronger our WHY the less relevant or impactful our mood cycle. Winston Churchill has a great quote about going to from failure to failure, without losing our enthusiasm. That is a brilliant summary of what is needed to succeed in sales and in life. There are always going to be more “nays” than “yeas” from buyers, so we better harden up and bolster our WHYs to control our moods and boost our enthusiasm.
