The Unhappy Sales Person

Do you know one?  Are you one?

Sales is a stressful area - you are very much like the proverbial olden day hunter.  Finding, stalking and dispatching your prey for the rest of your community to survive.  Failure means hunger or, in extreme situations, worse.

However, unlike the hunting analogy, in modern terms nataural selection doesn't always weed out the unsuccessful hunter.  Some turn in to the unhappy sales person.

Like this hunter however, they often only have themselves to blame.  The prey is still there, it may move, be smaller, be more cunning and be a focus for more hunters, but it is still there.  It is their own shortcomings that is creating the unhappiness. 

How do you become a happy sales person?

• Learn from the good 'hunters' - this is how we've always learnt.  In the hunting analogy, children of the village learned and watched the elders.  You should too.  Find a successful sales mentor (real or virtual) and leverage their knowledge.  Every challenge is sales has been encountered by others - why try to solve it yourself from scratch?
• Stop making excuses.  Most excuses in sales are externally projected internal issues.  'My customers won't like that', 'No one does this', 'Cold Calling doesn't work' - are your own excuses, not those of your clients.  When unhappy in sales, it is easy to blame others.  Look at your reasons/excuses and determine which are real and which are your own roadblocks.
• Practice.  Whether in real terms in front of targets or in role playing situations - practice your craft.  You don't get better at sales by not selling.  Revise your mindset that you aren't making mistakes, you're learning.  This goes hand in hand with learning from others. 
• Do more of it.  One kill doesn't maketh the hunter - doing it regular does.  Good sales people sell whether busy, whether quite, whether happy or sad.  You're likely hired to sell - so why aren't you doing it more often.  Like practice, there's no better training than game time.
• Reflection and Feedback.  Mistakes only become a problem if you don't learn from them - we've all heard this.  However, similarly, successes are hard to repeat if we don't reflect on why we succeeded.  Review you wins and losses.  Ask those around you for feedback.  Growth comes from this process.

Do you want to stay unhappy?  Whilst you may not like being unhappy, it often feels easier to stay there than the effort required to change.  Worse, sometimes you don't even see yourself as unhappy so see no need to change.

Ever watch Kitchen Nightmares?  Most people hate the position their business is in, resist all attempts to fix it and then, when out the other side, wonder why they didn't change earlier and, suddenly, love what they're doing.  Yes, they may have to work harder and differently - but the reward more than offsets the extra effort.

It's all a choice.  So why choose to be unhappy?