Choosing to have a healthy attitude can make the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful selling career. Your attitude is contagious, influencing the mood of the customers and prospects you’re trying to sell.
Attitude can be a valuable ally or a destructive enemy.
Attitude and emotions
Emotions are neither positive or negative. It isn’t bad to feel anger or depression. Emotions make us human, but they can have a negative influence if we let them affect our attitude. You may be sad, hurt or even depressed, but it’s what happens to your attitude when you call on customers and prospects that counts.
Here are nine examples:
- Changing attitudes
Maintaining a positive, perfect attitude all the time is not possible. Selling is an exercise of trying to beat the odds of rejection. Any person who is attempting to persuade another individual is more likely to be rejected than accepted.
- Handling adversity
Attitude is most critical during tough times. Succeeding in sales has a lot to do with how you handle adversity. Successful salespeople are able to maintain a positive mental position even when adversity strikes. They allow themselves to experience their emotions and work through them. They realize it’s what happens to their attitude when they experience these emotions that counts.
- Take action
Do you shut down or open up during hard times? Do you put your head down and just keep doing what you know you must to succeed? Or do you allow the negativity to affect your attitude during your next presentation?
- Ego-strength
The essential question is: Do you have the resiliency or ego-strength to bounce back from rejection? Successful salespeople view rejection as something to get over, to get through, to get on the other side of. They learn from negative experiences and turn them into defining moments. They recognize that rejection is part of the job of being a salesperson. The rejection doesn’t destroy their positive view of themselves or change their positive attitude. They learn to use it as a motivator.
- Taking it personally
Salespeople who don’t have sufficient ego-strength to react with resiliency may take rejection personally. They feel the “no” is a “no” to them personally, so it stays in their minds and affects their attitudes. Since an attitude often is expressed by our body language and by the looks on our faces, it can be contagious when dealing with prospects and customers.
- Attitude determines your relationships
Attitude determines your relationships with customers and prospects. You prepare the grounds upon which they’ll treat you by your attitude toward them. Often attitude is the biggest difference between success and failure in closing sales.
- Trust and attitude
Trust may determine the attitude customers and prospects have about you. It is the start or stop of any relationships. Trust occurs on several levels. It has to do with knowing you have customers’ best interests at heart and that you will come through for them, time and again. It’s the trust you establish with customers that allows them to open up and always have a positive attitude about you, as well as the products and services you’re selling.
- Enthusiasm and attitude
Enthusiasm is a priceless quality that influences attitudes in salespeople. It builds courage and corrects bad attitudes and slumps. Here are three truths about enthusiasm.
- Enthusiasm is undermined by negative influencers. High achievers surround themselves with positive ideas and role models. They accept failures as part of the job, bounce back quickly and redouble their effort and resolve.
- Enthusiasm is the result of self-discipline, not self-indulgence. Self-indulgence is thinking about what is good for you, then taking action. Self-discipline is thinking about what’s good for customers and showing them why.
- Enthusiasm allows salespeople to treat all prospects and customers with the same attitude. A salesperson’s attitude should always remain confident and consistent.
- Persistence
Salespeople with persistence have the ability to maintain a positive attitude regardless of the economy or the competition. They see problems as opportunities to use their creative energies, and they look upon obstacles as challenges to be met and savored. They are not defeated by rejection. They recognize that determination, perseverance, enthusiasm and a positive attitude are the backbones of selling success.
Adapted from: How High Will You Climb? By John Maxwell, a leadership expert who has sold more than 22 million books.
