Sales Effectiveness: Lesson 5
The Heart of a Salesperson

 

In April 2010 we offered you insights to sharpen your sales effectiveness building upon the work of Stephen Heiman and Diane Sanchez in The New Strategic Selling.  If you've followed the subsequent series you've been reminded that selling is a science of discovery that relies on great listening skills, a vigilant prioritization of your time, and detailed record keeping.

Our final question is the most important:  "Is your heart really in your game in a way that results in genuine joy?"

You may succeed as a salesperson by tracking your buying influences' motivations and level of influence, and ensuring you spend enough time with the right people.  With a sharp mind and strong commitment you can do the work required to be effective.  However, you will only thrive as a salesperson if your heart is in your game.  By thrive we mean really love your work.  And the work of a salesperson includes both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.  It's easy to love our moments of success, but can we really learn to love our moments of defeat?

It depends on what you believe defeat means.  This is relevant in two domains: your career choice and your individual selling situations.

We think defeat in your career choice occurs when salespeople compromise their values by selling a product or service they don't fully believe in or that has intrinsic compromises in it.  Selling snow to Eskimos is really no way to make a living.  You can only love your work when it comes to your career choice by offering a product or service you can endorse completely.  If you are feeling defeated because your heart cannot find peace with the company or offer you are representing, and you sense improvements are not possible, you only have one choice.  You need to move on and follow your heart until you are selling something that you truly believe in.

Defeat in your selling situations is another matter.  You fully believe in what you are selling, but sometimes you miss a clue or fail to develop rapport with an influential decision maker and you miss your opportunity.  Worse yet, you might successfully make a sale and then fail to deliver the promised value.  It happens to the best of us.

We can lose heart over these problems if we are not prepared to deal with them effectively.  We need to acknowledge our failures and accept responsibility for them.  We must learn to forgive ourselves for our own human errors so that we can learn from our disappointing experiences.  Ultimately, we must move forward with new resolve to expand our contribution and success.  Since we've paid a price for our lessons learned, we need to reap the rewards from that investment.

It sounds easier than it is.  Loving our failures is not our first thought when they occur.  We often make excuses and defend ourselves from the painful moment we wished had not happened.  We waste energy explaining why the failure occurred to ourselves and others.  These ways of processing our moments of defeat make them last longer than they need to.  The opportunity to love our work when defeated is to use our failures to deepen our reliance on the goodness in our own hearts.

The most effective way to do this is to face our disappointments squarely and feel the emotional distress that accompanies them.  It is not useful to wallow in these emotions but it is useful to feel them completely because they point to something you do need to take care of.  You need to take care of your view of the future.  If you are struggling within yourself over a moment of defeat, it is invariably due to your compromised view of your personal future, as opposed to what has actually happened.  Thoughts like "I'll never amount to anything" or "I have to make something happen pretty soon or I'll need to quit before I'm fired" will eat you alive if you let them.  You'll lose heart if you allow these dead end thoughts to literally worry you to death.

The good news is you don't have to go there.  When you notice you are struggling with yourself like this, you have a prime opportunity to strengthen your heart.  You will need to dig deep inside to reclaim your confidence in who you are, remembering your unique talents and the commitment you have to growth, learning, and improvement.  You need to remember your service ethic that inspires you to help people and motivates you to do all of the tactical activities that it takes to be successful.

At LionHeart, we know our methodology works because we've successfully used it ourselves - and with thousands of people in all kinds of difficult situations.  It helps us turn those agonizing moments of defeat into an expanded trust in the mystery or life-source that is at the core of our existence.  The methodology is a practice called remembrance.  It is simple and profound.  You simply choose a word or phrase that is both sacred to you and calls to your own view of goodness that is beyond your "self."  You focus your attention on your heart area and quietly repeat your remembrance word until you viscerally feel relief, insights, and revitalized energy replace the limiting belief about your future.  If you do this with sincerity and openness to directly receiving divine help you will be surprised at how powerfully effective this practice can be. 

Defeat happens but we can use our missteps to strengthen our hearts and renew our resolve.  And we are not talking about positive thinking here.  Instead, we need to feel the painful emotion, identify the limiting belief about our future and ask for help through our connection to our life-source.  And if you do this enough times you will trust that you are on to something extraordinary.  And you will learn to love all of your experiences as a salesperson. 

And what would you predict will happen to your professional effectiveness if this experiment works out for you like we suggest it will?  Let us know if you want to find out!