Quite simply the biggest challenge that any sales person must overcome is that of 'rejection'. Rejection is the #1 thing that stops so many people from achieving the success they want, both in sales and in their life as a whole.

What happens with rejection is that it causes people to stop taking action, even if just for a short time. When the person stops taking action then they are not making progress towards their goals and towards the success that they want.

This is something that I have seen in thousands of sales people, across the globe, whether it be people selling insurance or selling products in a retail situation. The general scenario goes something like this:

With the first client of the day people put a lot of effort into trying to make the sale. They are often in one of their best states and do their best to give a good presentation and deal with any objections that arise from the customer. Then what often happens is that the customer decides not to buy and the sales person feels like they have been rejected. Generally after this has happened 2-3 times, the sales person's emotional state declines and because of that the quality of their presentation also starts go down hill very quickly. As all this happens the chances of a customer buying also goes down as the sales person is no longer presenting well or dealing with any objections that come up. The sales person gets into the belief that why should they make the effort as the chances are small that the person will buy and thus this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

By the 5-6th time of the customer saying 'no', the sales person begins to feel that today is not a good day for them and starts to consider today not a good day for selling. At this stage they either give up for the day or begin to look for distractions that they make more important than presenting and selling for the day.

While the exact story and circumstances may change slightly, this is the pattern that almost all of unsuccessful sales people are playing over the world on a daily basis. While they keep this pattern, the majority of their success in sales is contingent on whether they have a good first few customers or not.

Successful sales people have mastered this problem of rejection and are thus able to go the distance keeping a good state and being able to make good presentations even if they have been rejected five times that day already. There are a number of ways that they do this including state management and disassociating out of the rejection.

Another good technique to get over this is to reframe what the actual meaning of what is happening. Very briefly here I will tell you that many of the top sales people are addicted to sales, in the same way someone is addicted to playing slot machines. They are always anticipating the jackpot that is just around the corner and thus they keep playing or in our case selling. What has happened here is that they have actually conditioned a whole new meaning into the action of the customer, that most people would refer to as 'rejection'. This is a fundamental difference from the average sales person.

In my Persuasion Sales course I go in depth of ways that you can condition yourself and show people some of the conditioning that the worlds top sales people have and how to use it to increase your sales and your company's success.