Don Miguel Ruiz presents four guidelines for living a great life in his superb book The Four Agreements.
The second guideline is: Don’t take anything personally.
This is perfect advice for any person who needs to sell to survive. He says nothing others do is because of you.
What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
And that is the key point in selling: Needless suffering. As we reach for the phone we watch some old mental re-run projecting ourselves into this task we are about to do. Very often it is like a series of trailers reflecting Armageddon.
This happens each time we want to make a call, draft a marketing email, visit someone, …
We have to break past this before we can get round to the selling part of our lives. This is especially so if the last selling experience did not work quite as well as we expected.
Stop taking the failures personally. Each failure is like an athlete in training, pushing to beat a time, and often missing. These failures are necessary stepping stones to success.
And stop taking the successes personally as well. They happen as a direct result of the failures. Focus on making one more sale. Whether this next effort is a success or failure, it teaches you a little more for your next effort.