How to Keep Your Sales Mojo

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How do you define a good sales day?

One without rejection? A day where the consumers of the world are more receptive than normal? 

A day with a significant sized sale surely qualifies.

A day where you score an appointment that sounds and feels like a great potential deal.

The day at the end of the month when you’ve met your sales goals, that is a great day, especially if you met a company goal and won a bonus! That is definitely a good sales day. The good sales days I want to draw your attention to are the quiet ones. 

Quiet days can be good sales days? Days without a sale or a profitable commitment of some sort? Surely you jest. No, I am serious. In fact I’ll take this a bit deeper; enjoying quiet days and finding the small victories in them may be the habit that creates happiness, and protects you from burn out as you travel along the emotionally challenging, gravel road called prospecting. 

If you only acknowledge and celebrate the blatant victories in your sales career, you will miss out on countless days you could have and should have celebrated progress.

I’m going to keep this “short and sweet” and pray that you take to heart the wisdom behind these words: CELEBRATE PROGRESS.

Have you ever heard of the wisdom behind enjoying the journey and not just the destination? It’s been said different ways and one quote goes:

“Life is a journey to be experienced, not a problem to be solved.” Where does this wisdom come from? It’s Winnie the Pooh’s version of a quote from a thinker named Jacobus Johannes Leeuw. Too many sales professionals “live for the kill.” Yes, selling on commission is an “eat what you kill” proposition, BUT the greatest hunters in the business world and in the wilds are practitioners. They are thinkers who master the idiosyncrasies of each prospect and sell to their needs and desires. It is a creative process, not simply a demo, these days. The creative process of making a friend, obtaining the position of being their personal specialist and concierge, goes before the demo. What used to be "floor traffic" is now online.

I want to leave the hunter/prey analogies now and examine the mindset needed to get the prospect into the habit of communicating with you. Why? Because over half of the relationships that could and should be started online aren’t. Or maybe, and this might mess with your mind, they have started but you don’t know about it. Invisible progress? It happens globally every day; a sales professional provides something of value to a shopper that the shopper appreciated, but the sales pro doesn’t know about. This is why you celebrate the progress of quality activity days. You have had SO MANY invisible good impression days, you wouldn’t believe it! 

Until the timing is right for the consumer, they are gathering information and waiting to “feel” the right time to make the purchase. We all do it. There are less compulsive luxury marketing purchases today than ever before, so we must honor the gestation period and have enough progress that some becomes visible every new month. There is software that can give us some indicators when someone has opened an email or taken an action. Acknowledging that actions are taken by shoppers that are invisible to the sales professional is critical to the sales person living in the real world. If a sales professional only believes what they see, they lose track of the reality that they may be silently endearing themselves to a buyer. Taking into consideration that they will surface when THEY decide to engage and stay safely away, maintaining some insulation from the dreaded salesperson until they feel safe is important. THIS IS NORMAL!  Poor, aggressive, selfish, sales professionals from the past have sullied the reputation of the sales profession. This barrier is not one honorable sales professional deserve, but it is nonetheless a reality that decent sales pros need to acknowledge and work to eliminate. You must sell confidence before you sell anything, so feeding content that instills trust is job #1. Nothing else can be accomplished until the prospect is willing to award you the position of being their official information provider. Becoming their concierge is HUGE and the only next step that matters. Your mojo should be served well if you STOP worrying about the bottom line as much as the journey along the way.

What kills mojo faster than anything? Desperation. Even if you need a sale badly, you don’t dare act like it. The invisible force field of desperation will sabotage a profitable opportunity faster than you can imagine. Celebrating the fact that you have added another prospect to your life, who considers you their main source, should be like a real estate agent who scores a listing! In most instances, a listing means eventual business. In the world of prospecting, attaining the position of being the official tour guide is equal to that achievement. As Seth Godin says, ”We’re not going to outgrow our need for information.” Every consumer of every product or service will follow the trust they felt from a specialist if it is an important buying decision and not a commodity purchase. You should be ecstatic when someone gives you their friendship; you are then more than 50% of the way to being the one to help them make their best buying decision. Stuff your pipeline full of those and even if you didn’t make a sale at the end of the day, you should feel fulfilled that you found someone to help. 

Would you like to be a happy sales professional? Concentrate on quality activity. Concentrate on making friends. The sales will come.  

The definition of mojo? It’s kinda nebulous and just a fun word I used because it was an interesting way to broach an important subject: celebrating small steps along the way to a successful sale. I don't subscribe to any of the supernatural underpinning behind the term, but I believe it is important to feed your psyche positive reinforcement and recognize that it takes so many “No’s” to get to a “Yes”; even when you disqualify someone, it is a victory because that is a person who will no longer take up your time and energy because what you have have and their need or perception don't match. 

YOU are in charge of feeding your mojo, your prospects and your life. It is not a magical, mystical element from the cosmos; it is the result of the seeds you have sown. If you serve the shopping public by educating them and shepherding them toward their most informed purchase, you will reap what you sew. So celebrate the seeding, watering and cultivating of your prospects. Celebrate the process and not just the day you get to harvest. It will add many, many more enjoyable days to your sales life. Celebrate watching the leads grow. That will feed your mojo.

“Actively recognizing progress toward your goal will ultimately end up inspiring you and having you push even harder.” - Denzel J. Wellington