Selling: how to keep motivated

Do you sometimes feel you can't even get in the front door?

As I sit here at the quietest time of the business year my mind is turning to sales.

We don’t know yet what the troubles in Europe mean for the global economy but we do know that not all companies will survive the tide going out for the next little while.

Having fought my way through the last recession by taking on five times the normal customer base in order to maintain turnover (and almost having a nervous breakdown to go with it), I am furiously determined to come out of this one with a bigger and more profitable company.

So again back to sales – the lifeblood of any business.  Of the many aspects of sales my question today is how to keep your motivation up.

I don’t know about you, but the rejection can really get to me sometimes.

For every positive meeting you may have ten bad ones.

For every friendly phone call you get told to go away by four or five people.

Most of the time you can brush it off, but every negative experience takes a little piece of you and it’s hard to get it back. After over 7 years of selling professional services, recruitment services and engineering services, some days I feel worn down.

If you really want to feel some more rejection in your life just try selling recruitment services into middle management – it is a magnificently masochistic profession.

On top of the constant rejection there are also times where personal factors such as illness in the family, divorce, death of a loved one, etc. can sap your energy leaving you with little vitality for making sales calls.

Yes, I know taking a holiday could help, but guess what folks, when you are establishing the business that’s really not going to happen for the first year of two.

First I thought I’d start with a bit of a sidetrack into acting. Actors are selling themselves and their own ability, so the many rejections they face are truly hurtful. Their pride is trashed by rejection on an almost daily basis and they can’t separate their own ego from the product as they are the product.

Here are some tips from the world of acting.

http://www.ace-your-audition.com/dealing-with-rejection.html

http://www.actingbiz.com/articles/dealing_with_rejection.php

http://joy-osmanski.suite101.com/dealing-with-rejection-as-an-actor-a194744

Next, the following are links into articles and blogs from salespeople on how they deal with rejection and stay motivated.

http://salescareer.net/how-to-stay-motivated-in-your-sales-job/254

http://www.nextlevelsalesconsulting.com/sales-insights/free-sales-tips/tips-staying-motivated-while-prospecting.php

http://thomas-kelly.suite101.com/how-to-stay-motivated-to-make-sales-calls-a99215

http://www.davekahle.com/article/motivated.html

http://www.salesresources.com/articles/article.cfm?ID=103

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/5-easy-ways-to-stay-motivated.html

http://salesgurunl.blogspot.com.au/2010/07/staying-motivated-in-challenging-times.html

Your observations are also welcome – please feel free to comment or email me.

As a good friend says – “keep on swinging, you might just connect”.

And remember to smile.

Stop trying to do it all yourself

Why are you doing the work yourself?
But darling, I save on fuel.
Yes, but it takes us ten times as long to get there.

The formative stages of your new business venture are hard. You need to be doing a little bit of everything – marketing, legals, accounting, design, IT, HR and more.  You very rapidly learn to be a generalist.

If you can get across the fundamentals then you can help the company grow rapidly with a minimum of indecision. This works for a while, but sooner or later the company gets too big for one individual to be the decision maker – there are just not enough hours in the day.

I have seen many examples of fast growing companies topping out at about 20 employees and having trouble growing beyond that. I have no studies to back this up for you, but the maximum size of a company under a central decision maker seems to be in the 20-30 employee mark.

The issue here is the founder. Once they worked out how to do everything they then try to keep doing it. Sooner or later you need to start trusting your people and managers to do their job.

You can use part-timers to help out. Hire an accountant one day a week. Hire an experienced HR person on a 2-3 days a month basis. Put on salespeople on a commission basis. Have IT support on a retainer.

Give yourself a break and help your company live up to its potential and stop trying to do it all yourself.