Life is a circle of dualities. There are no absolutes. While success is what you aim for, expect, and make peace with failures. Don’t take either personally. One will follow the other, over and over again.
If you are in the profession of sales, well, everyone is, then having a big heart and a detached mindset will be of great value to your career. As much as you want to change the world and bring people a better quality of life with your product or solution, not everyone will share your vision of making their lives better. Don’t make their decline to your proposal as a dent in the fulfillment of your goals.
Rejection is good. Rejection is normal. Rejection is needed. You would not buy everything that was offered to you. It would be an insane idea, even if someone suggested it. By that virtue, if your decline and rejection are reasonable, so is everyone else’s. But if you truly believe that your product or service will help your client, then use the possibility of rejection to your advantage by understanding it and working with it instead of being dejected by it.
Here are some ideas you could work with:
- Trust. It’s simple, if they don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you. Trust from a client comes easy when you have the correct knowledge, your product meets the exact need, and you hold the right intention for their wellbeing. You need all this on a 100% mark before you can expect your client to give you his hard-earned money as per your advice.
- Need. Sometimes, the client doesn’t feel the need to use your proposal. Instead of hard selling and pushing him away, stick around when his back is to the wall. There will be a time and a product / solution that will fit neatly in his requirement, keep the client around for that time when he will really need you. It’s just not now.
- Urgency. While some may agree with you and may find use in your product, they may have no urgency to sign up for it. Your pitch needs to have a built-in urgency. Impatience is the defining character of today’s Consumer. Use that to your advantage by building an urgency of immediate action.
- Conviction: If you are convinced about your product or service, if you genuinely believe that it will make the impact you promise, it will come through in your voice, in your eyes, in your pitch. Conviction comes from consumption, literally and metaphorically. If you are consumed by what you do, if you truly believe in what you do, your conviction is a natural instinct – the best tool for closing a sale.
And if ‘no’ still marks the end of your meeting, say ‘yes’ to keep the relationship going. If you have the trust of your client, if you truly have understood his need, if you believe that your product or solution is an urgent response to his situation and if you are convinced that you can help – then go back and get better, do better, so you can come back and serve him better.
You become a master salesperson when you don’t stop in your purpose when the client says yes, and most importantly, you don’t stop in your purpose when the client says no. You’ve got to keep going because that’s what you love to do. When your purpose becomes bigger than your target, you will become unstoppable, happier, and a super achiever.
Sandeep Mishra