Handling Rejection for Salespeople With Self Motivation

As a salesperson, rejection is inevitable. It’s practically in the job description. Salespeople have to deal with a constant stream of rejection and hearing a lot of “no’s,” more than almost any other profession. Considering this obstacle, salespeople can very easily get defeated, lose motivation, and question their abilities. This mindset is toxic to the productivity and success of a salesperson, and understanding how to overcome constant rejection is vital to anyone wanting to achieve their professional sales goals.

Richie Contartesi also knows what it’s like to face consistent rejection. He had a lifelong dream of playing big-time college football, but at 5’7 and 150 pounds, his goals always seemed out of reach. In spite of the odds, Contartesi actually did overcome the rejection and earned a full scholarship at Ole Miss through his own self motivation.

“Everyone always told me it was impossible. Everyone always told me I wasn’t talented enough. Everyone always told me it was an unrealistic dream,” said Contartesi. “But what all of these people didn’t know was how hard I was willing to work, and all of the obstacles I was willing to overcome. What they didn’t see was my character.”

Since his days playing college football, Contartesi has become a #1 bestselling author of a book chronicling his journey, and now spends his time as a Motivational Youth Keynote Speaker, sharing his story of overcoming rejection with schools and organizations across the country. There is a lot that can be said for someone who overcomes such profound obstacles.

This video highlights some of the best moments from Contartesi’s speaking career, giving those in the sales world a glimpse into how he tells the tale of his own self motivation, and how others can self motivate themselves. For more information on Contartesi, check out his expert sales interview with John Golden, and his book, In Spite of the Odds: A true Inspirational Journey from Walk-on to Full Scholarship at Ole Miss.

Justin Cohen’s New Book: Step #5 “Purpose”

Have you been following along with Justin Cohen and John Golden as they explore the six steps of pitching to win? Each week, SalesPOP! is bringing you a video detailing each step of the process, so by the end, you’ll be an expert on pitching to win. This video explores step five, purpose.

Be a Giver:

When we think about pitching, we think of ourselves getting to win a deal. But the best way to win is to focus not on what you’re going to get, but rather on what you’re going to give. Say you have two people pitching you the same product with similar prices. But, one person gives you the sense that they have your best interest at heart, and wants to ensure that you win and your business thrives through their offering. You might even see this salesperson as sincere enough to tell you if you’d be better off buying from another provider. The other salesperson is obviously all about making the sale. They are hungry for a win, and to get their commission. You’re going to be more inclined to purchase the giver.

Serve Before Selling:

There are various ways to be a giver. It could look like many different things, varying from giving people samples, or being an expert in your industry and sharing your tips, tricks, information, and knowledge. Giving people things may not always result in a direct return, but it creates a relationship with potential buyers, shows your credibility and your character, and it makes people more likely to come back to you when they are ready to buy. “We need to serve before we sell,” said Cohen. “And to do that, we need to be driven by purpose.”

You can watch the rest of the pitch to win series here: Pitch to Win Series 

To get a more in-depth look at how to pitch to win, be sure to check out Justin Cohen’s book

About our Host:

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Win Back Your Life: How to Use Open Thinking for Salespeople

“While it may not occur to us on a daily basis, there is a widespread cultural tendency toward quick decisions and quick action. This pattern has resulted in many of society’s greatest successes, but even more of its failures. Though the root cause is by no means malicious, we have begun to reward speed over quality, and the negative effects suffered in both our personal and professional lives are potentially catastrophic.” Have you suffered some of these catastrophic effects by getting too caught up in quantity over quality? Dan Pontefract, interviewed by John Golden, explores how to win back your life with open thinking.

This expert sales interview explains open thinking, including:

• The tendency to have “corporate ADD”
• How to Win Back Your Time
• How to Win Back Your Collective Intelligence

Corporate ADD:

Many employees find themselves suffering from a “corporate ADD,” where they rush from meeting to meeting, and constantly reply to emails without really taking the time to critically or creatively think. This produces a sort of “pseudo-productivity,” where it seems like things are getting done because we’re so busy all of the time, but in reality, we’re just more distracted. This tendency creates a burden on organizations, and they’re suffering as a result. People are outsourcing their thinking because they think they need more time, but they outsource it so much that it becomes a disservice.

Consequences of Fast Solutions:

Fast solutions are sometimes not solutions at all. When companies and managers request information or results in an unreasonably fast amount of time, they’re not allowing their teams the time to creatively or critically think, and the solution doesn’t get the right kind of scrutiny necessary. Pontefract gives the example of Samsung, who wanted the release of their Galaxy Note 7 before Apple released their iPhone 7. The result was a fast solution, but a poor one. Samsung employees were not properly able to scrutinize the products, and as a result, the Galaxy Note 7 was shipped to consumers with faulty batteries that were at risk for exploding.

Win Back Your Collective Intelligence:

Using open thinking also involves winning back your collective intelligence. “There are smart people out there, and we have given up face-to-face interactions for the digital, asynchronous interactions,” said Pontefract. “We want to be part of something bigger, this huge collective intelligence. But ideas are formed and decisions are better made when you allow the slow thinking movement to occur. That occurs by meeting people again and being face to face.” Part of the training involved in winning back your collective intelligence is rethinking how you engage with others, and the platforms you use to engage with them.

Win Back Your Time:

Pulling away from this widespread corporate culture might be difficult, but there is a way to create space and silence, even in a world that’s working against you doing so. It involves practice. “It’s like a sport, you have to train for this sport,” said Pontefract. “We need to win back our time.” The first step in open thinking is to take control of your calendar and schedule. This could look like having a 15-minute meeting instead of an hour-long meeting. During this 15 minutes, everyone agrees to be very focused on important topics that require in-person conversation. Email or other methods can be used to discuss additional necessary topics that perhaps aren’t relevant to the whole group. You then have extra time not spent in meetings to work on activities that are more pressing and important. Rethinking your calendar might also involve rethinking habits, such as checking your phone before you even get out of bed in the morning.

Win Back Your Life:

You are in charge of your own life, schedule, and calendar. If you work 40 hours a week, you can do things within that workweek to own a little bit more of your time. Controlling your calendar is the first big step to winning back your life with open thinking. When you have open spaces that show up on your calendar, what are you doing in those empty spaces? Are you filling that time with absentminded scrolling through social media? Open spaces should be filled with things that help you in the long term or short term, or fuel your idea factory. Everyone else is too glued to their devices and becoming ever more distracted. “If you want to win back your life, win back your calendar,” said Pontefract.

Dream, Decide, Do, Repeat:

This sequence is the key to open thinking and creating success in both your personal and professional life. If you don’t dream because you don’t have time, the decisions that you make are less than stellar, so you’re just frenetic in what you do. But if you take time to dream better, make more creative and critical decisions, and then apply your thinking by taking actionable steps, you can help generate an experience where you are making conscious, effective, and productive decisions, as opposed to quick, poorly executed decisions.

About our Host:

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Understanding Triggers to Improve Sales Skills

You have a busy day planned. Your to-do list is filled with important activities that will take you the rest of the day. You sit down at your desk and prepare to start knocking things off the list. But, first, you have a question for Google. “Just a quick search,” you think to yourself. “It’ll just take a few minutes.” Three hours later, and you have completely forgotten why you went online in the first place, and your to-do list has gone by the wayside. Does this sound familiar? In today’s era especially, we are more distracted by triggers than ever before. Marshall Goldsmith, interviewed by John Golden, discusses triggers and how to avoid them.

This expert sales interview explores understanding triggers, including:

• Defining triggers
• Identifying triggers
• A daily activity to better understand your triggers

What is a Trigger?

A trigger is any stimulus that might impact behavior. This could be a sight, a sound, a word, or anything that influences what we are doing. Sometimes these triggers push us towards becoming the person that we want to be, but most of the time, the opposite is true, and they distract us from our goals. Goldsmith wrote a book called “Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts — Becoming the Person You Want to Be.” Triggers are inevitable. They constantly impact the way that we function, both personally and professionally.

Identifying Triggers:

“Understand triggers that may be holding you back from becoming the person that you want to be,” said Goldsmith. Having insight into how your triggers positively and negatively affect your behaviors will put you one step closer to using triggers for your benefit. This process takes discipline, though. “We struggle to identify and understand triggers because we don’t see the triggers as a trigger,” said Goldsmith. “We journey through life without learning the impact that our environment has on us, but the environment is very powerful. Without meaning to, we let our environment control us. It’s all triggers.”

Daily Question Process:

“Why don’t we become the people we want to be,” said Goldsmith. “As we journey through life we have these visions of who we are, and even on a day to day basis, we rarely live up to these goals.” Goldsmith provides an easy, daily task to help live up to these goals and increase self-awareness around triggers, and make negative triggers easier to identify and avoid. It takes four minutes, costs nothing, and will help you get better at almost anything. It sounds like it’s too good to be true, but the people who use this daily understand that it works. In one column, list everything that is important to you in question form. Each day of the week, you give yourself a score on how well you did each thing that was important to you. “If you do this every day, you learn very quickly that life is incredibly easy to talk, but it’s incredibly difficult to live. When you do this activity, don’t look at your talking values, which are very pretty, look at your living values, which are not so pretty.”

Selecting Your Questions:

For example, if it’s important to you that you have a productive day, instead of clicking around on the internet for three hours, you might write down: “Did I do my best to be productive today?” At the end of the day, when you reflect on your productivity and give yourself a score, you might notice that you were triggered by online distractions that pulled you away from your goal. The next day, the idea is that you will be aware of the trigger and can avoid it to keep you on your goal of being productive. Some other top questions to ask yourself are: 1) Did I do my best to set clear goals? 2) Did I do my best to make progress towards achieving my goals? 3) Did I do my best to find meaning, vs someone else creating meaning for me? 4) Did I do my best to be happy? 5) Did I do my best to build positive relationships? 6) Did I do my best to be fully engaged? “If you look at the research, it’s amazing,” said Goldsmith. “Ask these six questions every day, and a huge majority of the people say that they get better.”

To learn more about understanding triggers, and applying them to your professional role as a salesperson, watch the entire expert sales interview.

About our Host:

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Justin Cohen’s New Book: Step #4 “Presence”

We are halfway through the six steps to help salespeople pitch to win. Step four is presence. Being present is crucial for salespeople who want to stay engaged with their buyers. You can’t pitch appropriately if you don’t understand what the buyer needs, and you can’t know what they need if you aren’t present with them through the whole process. Check back next week to learn about the next step, and master pitching to win. John Golden interviews Justin Cohen.

The Importance of Presence:

Research tells us that the way that we say the words is more important than the words themselves. Think of the different ways to say “I love you.” There are many different tones that you can take when saying those words to someone. The words are the same, but the message is very different because of the way that it is said. When we are pitching, we tend to think almost exclusively in terms of what we’re going to say. This is good and important because what we have to say makes a difference.

Present, Emotional Pitching:

The same is true in a sales pitch. If you begin selling, and your facial expression, your tone, your body language do not convey and match what you are saying, they will sooner believe how you said it over what you said. And, if your nonverbal communication is contrary to what you say, they will see you as insincere and discreditable. When people pitch, often times, all they think about is their script. The number one reason that buyers pick one pitch over another, though, is energy and enthusiasm. It’s not the script. It’s the nonverbal communication. “You have to show the emotion,” said Cohen. People will make their decision based on emotional reactions, and then use logic to rationalize things later.

You can watch the rest of the pitch to win series here: Pitch to Win Series 

To get a more in-depth look at how to pitch to win, be sure to check out Justin Cohen’s book

About our Host:

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Perseverance in sales is difficult. If there’s any factor that pushes someone away from being a salesperson, it would be the constant rejection. Sales is a difficult, challenging field. Salespeople get told “no” constantly, deal with potentially difficult clients, and juggle a lot of information, all at once. If you explore the retention statistics, many people struggle to have perseverance in sales, and have relatively short careers before getting burnt out, or deciding to switch to another career. Elinor Stutz discusses not giving up in sales in this #SalesChat, hosted by John Golden and Martha Neumeister.

Stutz discusses perseverance in sales:

• Having a “fondest vision,” a high up goal or account that you always have your eye on, even if you are doing other tasks to have an income coming in
• Avoiding distractions, especially when things aren’t going very well
• The benefits of account management and relationship mapping, and knowing who in the company will be your best shot at closing the deal
• How to mentally and physically prepare yourself for tackling problems head-on
• The importance of having a full pipeline, and knowing that if one thing doesn’t work out, the next thing probably will. Thinking worst case scenario makes it difficult to have a positive outlook.
• Pick an industry that you enjoy working in, and continually research companies within the industry so you can be an industry expert and elevate your credibility
• The importance of continuing education on the industry and prospecting companies. Don’t rely on your organization for training opportunities. Instead, invest in yourself.
• Become an advisor that helps their clients solve problems; not a salesperson. This will help immensely in your sales conversations.
• Many people salespeople think in terms of “this is impossible, I can’t do this,” but instead, think, “what would happen if I didn’t do this?” in order to find motivation and endurance
• Figure out what you enjoy, and do that. That’s the best way to be successful.
• Actionable tasks that you can do now to build your pipeline, including having nice, welcoming conversations with old customers to get appointments with returning customers
• How to use CRM as a tool for building relationships and expanding your pipeline
• Maintaining constant motivation, instead of having bursts of productivity and then periods of burn out
• Start out with your favorite clients, and have enjoyable conversations with them, before moving on to making calls to prospects that you aren’t as excited to talk to
• Ensuring you have a positive mindset of, “I can do this.”
• How to make yourself an enjoyable salesperson that prospects actually want to talk to

Recorded Live on 2nd August 2018 9am PT/Noon ET

Episode Questions

1. In Sales there are a lot of road blocks and things that can unmotivate you to keep selling. How can you combat this and instead muster up the courage to continue?
2. What can people do if the sale doesn’t go as predicted? Is there any suggested Plan B?
3. What are the most important keys to stay focused in order to achieve everything you want?

Our Guest

Elinor Stutz

Elinor Stutz broke through barriers long before doing so was popular. First, she proved women can sell. Her blog Smooth Sale was created to teach how to earn a returning and referring clientele. Elinor is an international best-selling author, a Top 1% Influencer, and sales guru and inspirational speaker.

Links › smoothsale.net | twitter.com | linkedin.com

Our Hosts

About Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Martha Neumeister

Martha is social media strategist, responsible for all social media platforms of Pipeliner CRM. She is a communication expert with social media affinity, which she has been focusing on throughout her professional career. She has a bachelor´s degree in Entrepreneurship & Management and a master´s degree in Online Marketing which supports her in her career as Social Media Strategist.

About SalesChats

#SalesChats is a fast-paced (no more than 30 minutes) multi-media series that provides leading strategies, tactics and thinking for sales professionals worldwide. It can be found on Twitter (#SalesChats), as a live Google+ Hangout, and as a podcast available on iTunes, SoundCloud and right here on SalesPOP! If you think you would make a great guest for #SalesChats, please contact co-host Martha Neumeister.

#SalesChats is co-hosted by John Golden, CSMO Pipeliner CRM, and Martha Neumeister, Social Media Strategist Pipeliner CRM.

Adrian Davis has some insight into the world of sales and technology. The role of technology in sales is huge, and it plays an increasing role in the life of sales professionals. Because of the importance of technology and sales, it is crucial to understand the proper ways to utilize it.

1. We need to embrace technology and overcome the reluctance to become comfortable with it.
2. Salespeople should embrace technology so we don’t become obsolete, and because these tools can make us more efficient.
3. These tools help us become more organized and save time, allowing salespeople to be more consistent in our interactions with others.
4. Be conscious of using artificial intelligence carefully so that we can still engage in meaningful relationships with prospects.

Overcoming Obstacles as Salespeople

Our life is our own creating. And yet, many do not embrace overcoming obstacles very well. Much of life may feel like an objective truth, or an external reality that is beyond our control, but overcoming obstacles can lead to fruitful discoveries and unexpected growth, both on a personal level, and professional level. Isaac Lidsky, interviewed by John Golden, discusses a frightening and challenging experience that ultimately led to profound insights into the way that the human mind works and how to truly live life.

This expert sales interview discusses overcoming obstacles, including:

• Using interpersonal reflection to overcome obstacles
• The importance of self-accountability
• Difficulties of Choice

Eyes Wide Open:

Immeasurable joy, fulfillment, and success can be acquired through self-introspection and a commitment to holding yourself accountable. There are many examples of remarkable people, who in the most horrific and unimaginable circumstances, transcended. They found a purpose for themselves, found meaning, found career advancements, or just found a way to be better than they ever were before. “It cannot be the circumstances we confront that determine the life we live,” said Lidsky. “Our lives are not happening to us, we create it.” But just as we have the potential for enlightenment and self-exploration, we also have the ability to make self-limiting assumptions and perpetuate our insecurities. Belief in our own fears, living by unhelpful notions of what success is, and other internal core beliefs create a projection of these psychological predications that only serve to limit us. Using self-reflection to understand these beliefs, and reframing them, allows us to be focused on things that propel us further instead of holding us back.

Self Accountability:

In every moment, we are choosing who we want to be. Two people can face exact or similar circumstances, and for one person it’s a minor setback, but for another, it is the end of the world. One person can find joy or humor in a situation, where another might find only tension and resentment. “It’s choice, at the end of the day,” said Lidsky. “Accountability is, for me, a firm commitment to this idea that I’m not going to lie to myself, and I recognize that my life is an amalgam of my choices. It’s not always easy to do, I’m not superhuman, but this is a discipline that takes effort and practice. But, it’s well worth the effort.”

Difficulties of Choice:

Many people, including those in sales, struggle to make choices. Proactive choice makes you responsible for something and holds you accountable for it. And, when you choose one thing, you “unchoose” many other things. It becomes a scary endeavor. Many people opt to “not choose,” but in reality, not choosing is a choice in and of itself. Living your life happenstance, living your life reactively, or forsaking the questions of what value and success look like or all choices. They are the easiest choice to make, but they are the most dangerous. In order to achieve your success and goals, a choice must continuously be made, even while overcoming obstacles. It is not an option to not choose, so you might as well try to make the choice that creates the best outcome.