Salesmen are going to get turned down way more often than they are accepted. It is the unfortunate truth of sales, that there will be more no’s than yes’s. Yet people keep selling, and the best salesmen do not care about no’s at all. How do they do this? Buoyancy.
Buoyancy is a very important concept in sales. Without it, every single salesman would fail. They would not be able to handle inevitable no’s and so would not be able to sell. Buoyancy is the ability to stay afloat amidst all the no’s, but how do you do it?
There are three chronological steps to buoyancy. It starts off before the sales meeting with interrogative self-talk. Interrogative self-talk involves asking yourself questions before sales meetings. It helps you to look at yourself and your motivations. It keeps you grounded. Looking at your motivation within will lead to real action.
The next step is during the sales meeting: positivity. Although positivity before a meeting and in preparation can lead to overconfidence and be detrimental to sales opportunities, positivity during the meeting can be very important. If you start to get down this will harm you, and will also confuse and dissuade the customer.
Lastly, after the meeting, the salesman’s explanatory style is super important. It is important to stay positive here as well. You need to understand that not everyone is going to buy, so you really have not failed. You also need to think about what you learned from the meeting and the no. Not only that but you need to understand that it is not permanent and that eventually, you will get a yes.
BoweryJE22
As someone who gets very discouraged from a ‘no’, buoyancy is a trait that I need to work on. Nice post!
Buoyancy is very important in any sales call or meeting. I had to learn buoyancy through experience when I would call potential customers for a small business I worked at. You get a lot of rejections but you have to learn what you did and ways to change that to get people to say yes!
I like that you run through HOW to achieve buoyancy in this post. Positivity is a really important thing to have in sales, but like you said it can also hurt the transaction if there is too much of it. Unfortunately, we cant always win sales, but buoyancy can make losses more bearable and allow us to move on more easily.