Sales Fear
If you search for ‘sales fear’, most of the content says salespeople fear rejection.
Honestly, that’s a load of bs, likely written by someone who’s never worked in sales, or at least not a successful salesperson.
What they write about sounds like the old-school, or rogue sales folks who are all about their ego and who will have a bruised one if rejected. Think boozy Tony on a Saturday night getting rejected by the gal or guy they’re cracking onto, and instead of handing it respectfully when they’re told no, they lash out and insult the person - ya know, those kinda people. Most professionals are nothing like this, and ‘rejection’ is understood and managed appropriately so we think the sales ‘opinions’ need to evolve as the profession does.
With our extensive life experience (code for, we’re closer to Boomers than Gen Z), we know that fear is normal, and it can be a powerful driver of performance.
Yup, fear it’s normal, it’s natural and when handled well, many can be mitigated or give insight as to a smarter direction to take.
In part two we’ll share some ways of tackling fear but for now, we wanted to call out some of the main fears top salespeople are facing, which are more likely to be connected to intrinsic values, or success, that of ‘being rejected’.
The fear of not having enough time to achieve the goals they’ve set
The fear of there not being enough hours in the day to plan, see clients, follow up, learn more
The fear of not hitting target or achieving their bonus criteria
The fear of not recommending the right solution
The fear of being dragged into another internal meeting
The fear of the rapid change in sales/marketing and general business technology
The fear of ‘cut and paste’ new client details into old client proposal document and leaving one instance of the old client’s name in there
The fear of their sales leader not being able to develop them
The fear of the competition upping their game with their product or their sales capability
There’s a few that are really common across Australia and Aotearoa NZ at the moment, we’d love to hear what your sales fears are too so add to the list and in part two we’ll address a couple of the more common ones and some proven tactics to tackle them.