In December, I posted about the importance of having a strategy on how you are going to be successful in the upcoming year. Most people in sales do some sort of “80/20,” exercise and here is the article (linked here). Salespeople have a better chance to win when they lay out a plan and go after that plan at full force. However, even if your plan is perfectly thought out, there is one thing that happens almost every year…the gut punch. One of your customers is going to tell you something like: their plans have changed, they no longer have the budget, or they are going in a different direction. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been with you forever, you stood up in their wedding, or you took them to sit on the floor at the game. It’s always a shock and it always hurts. So, what do you do?
Well, first catch your breath. Allow yourself to be disappointed. It sucks when this happens.
Then think about how you have been successful to this point, and what strengths of yours were the key to those successes. Lean into those strengths to help you have a successful year. Many companies now do some form of personality/strength tests. At GKB we use Clifton Strengths which tells you your five signature strengths. These types of evaluations can help you take a deep breath, remember what got you here, and reset. If you haven’t done one of these tests, here is the Clifton one and it costs $24.99.
Now that you have looked at your strengths again, it’s time to make a plan on how to win post gut punch. Your plan could look like the following:
- Be pissed (not a strength…just a reality😊).
- Go back through your enterprise planning exercise to see if you could help your customers by referring them to someone in your network.
- See if there are referrals your network could help you connect to.
- Determine what a successful day and week looks like. Then, start having success one day at a time (fyi: one of my Clifton strengths is being an achiever, which Clifton states means “every day starts at zero” for me…and sales can feel like that a lot).
