A salesperson’s worst enemy

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. I’m not talking about your customers’ resistance, I’m talking about yours. The resistance that puts a knot in your stomach and stops you dead in your tracks when you’re involved in any activity around selling. The voice inside that will tell you anything to keep you from calling or meeting a new customer. The force is so strong and the voice so loud that giving in is easier than pushing through. Why do so many talented salespeople with excellent skills and abilities develop daily escape routes to avoid their sales activities?

The battle with sales resistance and sales phobia is raging! So what’s keeping salespeople from being spectacularly successful? The most important factor standing between most business owners and success is the failure to understand that sales are the only way to keep your business in business. Resisting and avoiding sales is a choice, and if not dealt with and met head on, will spell disaster for you and your business.

I meet salespeople every day who tell me they battle with sales resistance but in the same breath swear they are great at sales. Really? If you are such a great salesperson then why can’t you sell yourself on your own sales abilities? If you can’t sell you to yourself then no one will buy what you sell.

Traditional selling is dead. But unfortunately, many salespeople are still using outdated selling strategies. They no longer have that competitive edge that separates them from everyone else in the marketplace. Rather than changing their approach, they’re working harder and longer using strategies that keep producing the same dismal results.

Being a great salesperson doesn’t require an outgoing personality, being tough as nails, wearing underwear of steel, or possessing an aggressive attitude. It requires a new approach in a new economy with a new type of customer, minus the resistance.

Sales resistance can strike almost anyone in any profession, when it attacks someone in the role of sales or business development, it is a career killer. In fact, forty-three percent of sales reps with more than five years’ experience have admitted to at least one case of sales resistance so severe that it actually threatened their career.

This scenario will keep playing itself out over and over unless you change your approach. The most damaging sales resistance that exists is your resistance to the awareness of it and the necessity to make the change. Fear is disguised as resistance! What are you afraid of?

When you allow resistance to become a habit it will drag along its sidekick, rationalization. If unchecked and challenged, this dynamic duo will wreak havoc on your business. An amateur gives in to resistance but a true professional concentrates on the work and allows success to come. An amateur believes he or she must overcome the fear resistance in order to sell. The true professional knows it’s a fear you don’t overcome, it’s a fear you manage.

Resistance takes on many different forms, drains you of energy and robs you of many valuable hours. Use those hours instead to sell more productively, prospect more effectively and grow our business. The good news is that sales resistance is a learned behavior – which means that it can be unlearned! Remember, it’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell.

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