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Deal With Disappointment If You Want to Succeed in Sales

Deal With Disappointment If You Want to Succeed in Sales

Sales

All successful salespeople are able to deal with disappointment. Failure doesn’t immobilize them. But how do you deal with disappointment and failure in sales? Here are some ideas.

Sales is not always fair

I recently worked with a salesperson who replaced a salesman who was fired because of illegal behavior. The new salesperson had to negotiate a settlement for her company knowing that her predecessor had broken the law. That’s a difficult position to be in.

She really didn’t have any power to get an acceptable agreement. Her efforts to protect her company fell on deaf ears. What made the process so distasteful was that the opposing company took as much advantage of her weakened position as possible. Had she not accepted the unpalatable deal, it would have cost her company many hundreds of thousands of dollars more. The opponent knew that and pressed for the deal.

She signed the agreement.

Being taken advantage was depressing. What happened next? She made the strategic decision to move on. She gave herself permission to not accept fault for causing the awful problem. She congratulated herself for handling a bad situation and not backing away from it.

There will be a time when you fail in a sales situation that you didn’t cause. I’ve lost business to a brother-in-law whose products and services were inferior to mine. I’ve had competitors misrepresent their products in competitive bids and lost the business. I’ve had a distributor’s salesperson switch out my product with a competitor’s because he made more money. He did that without telling me so I lost sales. No, it’s not fair. It happens.

Anger doesn’t work

You might think that getting angry is a choice. It’s not. You risk irreparable harm to the relationship when you get angry with someone you still have to work with. I’m not saying you shouldn’t discuss the issue. I am saying having a heated argument is counterproductive. You risk hurting feelings and those take a long, long time to heal if they ever do.

The other choice is acceptance. That is the only choice that a successful salesperson makes. You can express disappointment that it happened. Then move on. Getting angry doesn’t work.

You are ready to be successful in sales when you know how to handle disappointment in selling. It’s not a question of if but when you will be disappointed. When you fail, be ready with your strategy to move on and not get immobilized from the failure. It’s the only way to be successful in sales.

Profile: Maura Schreier-Fleming

Maura Schreier-Fleming is president of Best@Selling, a sales training and sales consulting company. She works with business and sales professionals to increase sales and earn larger profits. She is the author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results and Monday Morning Sales Tips. Maura focuses on sales strategies and tactics that lead to better sales results. Maura is a sales expert for WomenSalesPros. She is part of their group of top sales experts who inspire, educate, and develop salespeople and sales teams.She speaks internationally on influence, selling skills, and strategic selling at trade association and sales meetings, demonstrating how her principles can be applied to get results. She successfully worked for over 20 years in the male-dominated oil industry with two major corporations, beginning at Mobil Oil and ending at Chevron Corp. She was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. and was one of Chevron’s top five salespeople in the U.S. having sold over $9 million annually. Maura writes several columns to share her sales philosophies. She's been quoted in the New York Times, Selling Power, and Entrepreneur.