Sales POP - Purveyors of Propserity
Salespeople: Learn Emotional Fitness
Blog / For Sales Pros / Jan 16, 2018 / Posted by Nikolaus Kimla / 4683

Salespeople: Learn Emotional Fitness

0 comments

Here is the next in my series on salesperson fitness.

Emotional fitness is important for anyone, but is crucially important for a salesperson. Something like 90 to 95 percent of the interactions a salesperson has are negative. Phone calls and emails are ignored. Gatekeepers furiously protect decision makers. Many have a 5 to 10 percent closing ratio. There is even constant resistance to prospecting.
How does a salesperson deal with what we could call the “dark side of selling”?

We Are Not All the Same

All the headlines right now are talking about the lawsuit filed against Google by ex-employee James Damore. The lawsuit contends that Google “discriminated against employees for their perceived conservative political views,” among other things. From what I can see, Google’s efforts in this matter have been to try and force everyone into the same mold–in this case a left-leaning mold–and discipline those that didn’t fit.

It’s a similar action to that being taken by today’s sales artificial intelligence: an attempt to blend together and perhaps even eliminate gender, racial, cultural and age differences. There’s a reason for programming AI algorithms to do this–if they don’t, it becomes impossible to predict human behavior. The thinkers of the Austrian School of Economics, such as Ludwig von Mises and Joseph Schumpeter, have been making the case for over 100 years that human behavior, by its very nature, cannot be predicted. The statistical methods being used by Google and others are being used in an attempt to predict how people will react.

Another angle on this “sameness” is one you’ve probably had experience with. You run into someone you haven’t seen for many years and they say, “You haven’t changed a bit!” The truth of the matter is that you have probably changed a great deal, and not just physically. What if you’ve changed for the better? What is meant as a compliment actually comes off like a curse.

Emotional fitness of a salesperson speaks to culture, language, gender, age, many other individual aspects of that person, and those of all the people they deal with. Our industry today seems to be trying to eliminate all these differences, just for the sake of easy analysis.

4 Tips for Overcoming Obstacles

Emotional fitness also means the ability to overcome the many obstacles and barriers that occur in sales; dealing with the “dark side of sales.” It’s interesting that this side of sales is often ignored in texts and promotion about sales. Instead they discuss making a lot of money, having an easy life, the travel–the beautiful side of it all. The only famous work that references how dark it can all be is Arthur Miller’s famous play Death of a Salesman.

Salespeople come across obstacles not found in other professions. Here are 4 tips for overcoming them.

1. Negative emotions are powerful, and can be used in positive ways. An example given in my ebook Emotions in Sales told the story of how Muhammad Ali turned the fear he felt before his first major heavyweight fight against Sonny Liston (for which the stated odds against Ali were 7-1) into the cocky confidence for which he would become famous. In the days leading up to the fight, he publicly taunted Liston with lines such as his now-legendary “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee; your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see.” He called Liston “a big ugly bear” and said that “After I beat him I’m going to donate him to the zoo.” Ali, as history shows, went on to win that fight in one of the biggest upsets in boxing history. The lesson we can learn from Muhammad Ali is a very profound one: It isn’t the fear that you feel, it’s what you do with it that matters.

Another example given in the book is the use of anger to determine something you need to actually have empathy for–because anger completely cuts off empathy and can can lose you a sale. “Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” and forcing yourself to be empathetic is one way you can utilize anger in a positive way.

2. When confronted with an attitude from someone else, you can realize that what’s happening isn’t inside of you, but outside of you. For that reason you can decide to deal with it objectively.

3. Every emotion has polarity, positive and negative. As a salesperson if you run with a negative attitude–for example you’re desperate for money and make a bad deal for your customer–it can have negative ramifications on your career, especially in today’s connected world. Bad actions on your part can follow you for the rest of your life.

We all experience extreme emotions. The question becomes, do we choose to engage in negative extremes of such emotional states? You might have heard or read the recent story about the actor who shot his wife, and has now been convicted of murder and will spend the next 40 years in prison. The anger he felt at the time of his crime might have been correct for the circumstances, but the action he took was obviously horribly wrong. Not only is his wife gone, but now he’ll be imprisoned for decades. If he had just stopped and questioned his actions at that moment, perhaps his wife would still be alive and he’d still be a free man.

The key to such emotions is not so much to push them away, but to integrate them into a higher purpose. How can you overcome the tendency to take to the wrong polarity? Simply by stopping and examining the situation, by realizing it doesn’t make sense. Take a good hard look, and wonder if that negative reaction is something that will truly benefit you in the long run.

Utilizing a tool like this is even more important in sales than it is in other professions, simply because a salesperson is hit with so much negativity. A doctor or an airplane pilot, as two examples, aren’t confronted with nearly this many negative attitudes.

4. Every day you should perform a cleansing of your thought process, just as you cleanse your body on a daily basis. For example, if you sleep on a problem you’ve been having or a decision you’ve been pondering, the next morning it will often look different. Take a look at the issues you were pondering yesterday, and ask yourself if you would make the same decisions today as you did yesterday. If the answer is “no” you probably have some more evaluation to perform about those issues and should probably sleep on them some more.

You Are the Driver

The bottom line of emotional fitness is that you are the driver–life or circumstances don’t drive you. There are numerous practical exercises that you can use to put yourself in the driver’s seat. One is given above–to stop and give it some rational thought.

Another is what I call the anchor. When you experience something emotionally beautiful, you consciously create an anchor to that experience–one that includes all of its emotions, visions and feelings. At a later time, in a bad situation, you can tap into that anchor and once again release that wonderful feeling you had then. It can save a bad situation, or even make it seem not so bad anymore.

In all cases, you need to drive on the positive side of emotions. If you don’t, you will never be successful in sales–and you will never be fit.
Fortunately, emotional fitness can be learned!

Pipeliner CRM empowers salespeople to be emotionally fit. Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

About Author

CEO and partner of pipelinersales.com and the uptime ITechnologies, which I founded in 1994 and has since played a significant role in the development of the IT-environment. pipeliner is the most innovative sales CRM management solution on the market. Pipeliner was designed by sales professionals for sales professionals and helps close the gap between the requirements of C-level executives for transparency and the day-to-day operational needs of field and inside sales. I am also the founder and Initiator of the independent economic platform GO-AHEAD!, which orientates itself on the principles of a free marketplace in terms of liberal and social responsibility. Connecting people, the trust of business leadership in terms of values such as freedom, self-responsibility, and entrepreneurial spirit, and strengthening their awareness in order to create a dynamic boost within the economy triggered through spontaneity, all stand for the initial ideas surrounding GO-AHEAD! I studied in Los Angeles and Vienna and received my Masters's Degree in 1994. I am married and have 3 children My Specialties are in: Sales Management, Sales CRM Software, CRM Cloud Solutions, SAAS, Business Strategy, Software Development, "Pipeline Management", Social responsibility, outbound sales, b2b sales, inside sales, sales strategy, lead generation, sales process, entrepreneurship, coaching, mentoring, speaker, opportunity management, lead management, Austrian School of Economics

Author's Publications on Amazon

This is a practical manual covering the vital subject of Sales Management. I firmly believe that sales are the most important profession for dealing with today’s turbulent world and Econo my, for salespeople create wealth and produce peace. But salespeople need a competent, stable leader—and…
Buy on Amazon
Inside this eBook, you’ll discover a series of chapters dedicated to some of the most important areas facing sales today. From the sales process definition to measurement, lead generation, and proven sales techniques, this comprehensive eBook will provide you with the information you need to…
Buy on Amazon
A common term in sales today is EQ, which stands for “emotional I.Q.” It means the skill a salesperson has in reading emotions and utilizing them in sales. It means empathy and a number of other abilities. The short version is, it’s an I.Q. when…
Buy on Amazon
People are smart to question the future of automation, for it has become part of everything we do. With the quantity of applications and technology around us, we yet still crave more. We become convinced of its power when our package is delivered from Amazon…
Buy on Amazon
Sales management isn’t a simple subject by any means. But at the same time, it does have some basic and somewhat simple fundamentals—and that is what we are bringing to you with this book. First come pain points of sales management, and how to overcome…
Buy on Amazon
Today the Internet has transformed a seller's market into a buyer's market and author Nikolaus Kimla states that the role of sales has never been more crucial. It is now time to give salespeople the role they factually can play: entrepreneurs within the enterprise. They…
Buy on Amazon
This is our public declaration of the intentions behind Pipeliner, and our objectives and motives for the product and for our company. Behind the development of that CRM application and, in fact, behind everything we do, we have a real cause. The story begins with…
Buy on Amazon
For the future, there must be a perfect balance of humans and technology. You have to have the perfect technology, andthen the perfect human being in application, performance and presentation. Today and into the future, it’s a 50-50 balance. In the past it was perhaps…
Buy on Amazon
The salespreneur is based on the concept of the entrepreneur. Before we can explain the salespreneur, you have to have some understanding of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur plays a crucial role in any economic system. The entrepreneur seeks out information that can be utilized for…
Buy on Amazon
A seasoned captain would never leave port without a competent navigator. In a similar way, a sales manager might be a total ace at "commanding the ship" – at inspiring and coaching sales reps, pointing out and getting agreement on making quotas, and keeping everyone's…
Buy on Amazon
Comments

..
..
.
Sales Process Automation
.
This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. For information on cookies and how you can disable them, visit our privacy and cookie policy.