This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Sell or Be Sold" by Grant Cardone. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are the major sales challenges? How do you overcome the challenges of selling?
The major sales challenges are customer rejection, loss of motivation, and call reluctance. You can overcome customer rejection by learning from your experience and not letting it affect your conviction. You can fix the loss of motivation by keeping your mind occupied with productive work, and preparing your script in advance will help you get over call reluctance.
Read on to learn more about how to overcome sales challenges.
Overcoming Sales Challenges
You’ll inevitably experience sales challenges in your career that can shake your commitment. Here’s how to handle some common, emotionally painful scenarios:
Scenario #1: Your product is rejected. It’s normal to dislike rejection, but it’s impossible to avoid, both in sales and in life. Handle it like this:
- Take responsibility. Rejection will only feel negative if you cast your customer as powerful and yourself as a victim. Instead, focus on how you can learn from the experience, which gives you agency.
- Don’t take it personally. Customers aren’t rejecting you; they just don’t want your product or offer.
- Don’t try to avoid it. This will make you timid and prevent you from taking the risks you need to take to make sales.
- Don’t let it affect your conviction. Remain sold on your product, even if other people turn it down.
Scenario #2: You’ve lost your motivation. The best way to stay motivated, in any industry, is to keep busy. This will keep your mind occupied and unable to dwell on negatives or the past.
- As an extreme example, if your kitchen is on fire, you don’t have any mental bandwidth to be depressed—your circumstances require your full attention.
Additionally, avoid negative people because they’re demotivating.
Scenario #3: You experience call reluctance. Call reluctance is a lack of enthusiasm to aggressively get in touch with clients and often includes procrastinating with busywork. If you have call reluctance, it doesn’t mean you’re inherently unqualified for sales—in fact, reluctance stems from a lack of motivation and competence.
To get over call reluctance, prepare a script in advance. You won’t be reluctant once you’re confident you can be well-spoken and field questions.
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- How your happiness and even survival depend on your selling ability
- The five steps to becoming a master salesperson
- Step-by-plans to lead the customer to make a purchase
