How to deal with depression in sales, Tim Hughes

One of the things that always amazes me about sales is the rejection, or it did amaze me, but I will come to that.

In his book "The Hope Circuit" the psychologist, Martin "Marty" Seligman talks about some of the experiments that have been undertaken with regard to depression. In this book it describes how animals and humans give up if they have undertake constant rejection. In the old days when you could experiment on dogs, if dogs were constantly rejected, they would just lie down to die. The same with humans. NB: No animals or humans were harmed in the writing of this blog.

Marty went on to be employed by insurance companies that burn through new sales recruits who cold called, the idea was that the insurance company needed a plan to stop these salespeople just burning out and giving up.

Legacy sales methods drive rejection and depression

Using techniques like cold calling and email you will be told on a daily basis, "no" by the people you are prospecting. The thing nobody tells you before you join sales is that is that a "no" - is rejection, you are a failure.

You may even work in an environment where getting a meeting means you get a treat, some validation, maybe somebody rings a bell. I bet it feels just like being in a laboratory.

This is the behaviour where Marty Seligman say that animals and humans just give up.

We all know that old joke

In sales this hatred by buyers and customers is often self inflicted, there is an old joke.

Question: "how do you tell a salesperson is lying?"

Answer: "Their lips are moving"

You know that, your buyer knows this and you know the buyer knows this. Buyers think you (as a salesperson) are a manipulative shit, that is only trying to sell them something to get your commission and then you will disappear. Buyers don't want to talk to you and they don't want yet another (templated) pitch from yet another salesperson.

The human cost of legacy sales methods

Rejection hurts. As buyers we all know that any cold caller will have a script, where the bottom right-hand-side of the spreadsheet is a "yes". So the only way to get rid of cold callers is to be rude.

I had a cold callers today, I just put the phone down and blocked the number.

"Stop F@£$%^g calling me" or "Take me off your email list" can often be the response.

As a salesperson you are told to have a thick skin, but it still hurts.

I know people who deliberately bait salespeople who call or email, just to waste their time.

I recently read an article about this, but it offered no solutions, the article seemed to say "man up"; rejection and depression comes with sales, learn how to deal with it.

We are all human and this rejection can lead to depression, but things have changed and you can build a lot of the rejection out of the sales process.

But there is another way and I want to share that with you now.

The other way is social selling.

How to take rejection out of the sales process and avoid depression

A buyer centric profile - We know as part of any outbound or outreach that buyers will look you up on social.

In our social selling and influence training and coaching, we take the attendees through how to build a profile that will be attractive to buyers. One of the things we teach is how to create a profile that will qualify out the people you can never sell to, this eliminates a whole stack of wasted time and effort and eliminates rejection.

If you check out this video of Chris Mason CEO at Oracle reseller Namos, fast forward to 19 minutes 55 seconds. Chris talks about a $2.6 million win from being on social, after completing the DLA Ignite social selling and influence course. Note Chris's comment that the buyer walked towards the Namo's salesperson, this is transformation. This is a different way of working and better for those that don't like the rejection.

If you have a sales profile on Linkedin, people will run away from you, if you have a buyer centric profile, people will walk towards you.

A digital territory - In our social selling and influence course we teach the participants how to create a digital territory. This means you are always front of mind to your clients, no longer do you need to keep calling them or keep emailing them and pissing them off.

In this digital world we need to be connected to every account we are trying to sell to. But, and the trick here is not to spam them and pitch them. The trick is to use the pro-active growth of your network as an ability to have conversations.

Just think, Linkedin allow you to have 100 connection requests per week, that's 100 conversations. Scale that across your sales team and you will see a massive uplift in pipeline.

As you are having conversations, you won't get the rejection. People want to have a conversation with you. Your output goes up in terms of meetings, proposals and sales and the rejection and depression goes down.

Content - Finally, we know that the modern buyer is on social to be social, research here. The modern buyer is looking for insight, they are not looking for brochures. Brochures do not create sales, so stop sharing them. Conversations create sales, so create insightful, educational and entertaining content.

Again, the conversations go up and the rejection and depression goes down.

All of these skills are taught in out social selling and influence course and coaching.

Now depression and rejection are serious subjects and I'm not saying that with social selling you will not get them, but we have seen in the many companies we have transformed that many of the pressure points that you get with legacy sales methods have been removed.

I realise that some of you will reject this, which is fine, but we have a long list of clients as customers who have rejected the old methods of sales and the rejection and depression that causes. One of our clients has even complained they have too much pipeline.

So who's social selling?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

I don't believe you Tim!

Here at DLA Ignite we don't do "hints and tips sessions" we don't want you to waste your money. Our social selling and influence methodology will provide your sales team with the stable platform for growth. It is also the only social selling program based on 70:20:10 change management principles which gives your business the mindset change and habit change they need in this digital world.

Other articles you might be interested in ....

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