Make a conscious effort to tell people around you how good they are, hat you rate them and honour them. The more you actively encourage others the more encouragement you will receive. Be clear about what works and actively replicate itģ. Hunt out successful colleagues and friends and ask them how they do it. Analyse what you do that gives you your wins. Understand your success and that of others. I simply had to recognise that those 296 rejections were the route to selling (and financial) success.Ģ. In practice that meant accepting 292 “No”s on the phone and 6 to my face in order to have a successful week. I had to make 100 cold phone calls a day Monday through Wednesday in order to get 8 appointments on Thursday and Friday in order to get 2 deals a week. In my 30s I found myself in a really tough commission only sales environment. Recognise that selling inevitably involves rejection. Here are my five practical ideas on managing your sales optimism:ġ. Martin Seligman absolutely does not favour blind optimism but talks about “flexible optimism ”“ optimism with its eyes open.” Sales is tough and being an optimistic seller does not simply mean believing that everything you touch will “turn to sold”. This is not about blind optimism or putting on rose-tinted spectacles. When it comes to sales she identifies a 37% difference in the sales result and a 31% difference in productivity between optimists and pessimists. Her application to work is even more striking: “Those in the top quartile for optimism as compared to their peers ”” are 40% more likely to get a promotion over the next year, not to mention six times more likely to be highly engaged at work, and five times less likely to burnout than pessimists.” That’s a strong endorsement for optimistic thinking! I find this really interesting it’s not key to optimism and sales. “Nearly two thirds of optimists have started an emergency fund, while less than half of pessimists have.” It also seems that optimists suffer financial stress 146 days a year fewer than pessimists do. Some of her work correlates optimism with financial wellbeing e.g. Here’s what Michelle Gielan adds to this work. Agents in the top decile sold 88% more insurance than those in the bottom decile.” (Over a 2 year period) In the 1980s he and Peter Schulman used a test to position 100 MetLife salespeople on a “pessimism-optimism spectrum” “Agents who scored in the optimistic half of (his optimism testing) explanatory style sold 37% more insurance than agents scoring in the pessimistic half. Martin Seligman who carried out strong research on the correlation between optimism and sales success. She builds on the work of her one-time research partner at The University of Pennsylvania Dr. I have just been reading an excellent piece in HBR by Michelle Gielan that ends up with a link to her online optimism/success correlation test So all in all you have to be optimistic to put yourself through all those rejections. 80% of buyers will say “no” 5 times before they’ll say yes. If you are involved in cold calling you probably have to make 18 calls to get through to a decision maker. To quote Warren Buffet “You need to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince”! Selling is one of the few roles in which people actively choose to face rejection in order to achieve success. But this is based on data as well as being just what we’d expect. We tend to think of salespeople as naturally optimistic. Optimism and sales: 5 ways to manage optimism in sales 5th March 2020
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