4. Strike while iron is hot! When working with a new prospect, it is important to make contact quickly. Prospects are perishable. No matter how interested a prospect may appear, don’t wait for them to call you. You are only one of many competing interests for your prospect’s time and money.

5. Keep high ground and avoid temptation to badmouth your competition. While it is fair to make head-to-head comparisons, you should avoid personal attacks. Attacking your competition makes you look unprofessional and petty. Emphasize benefits of your product or service by guiding your prospect through a comparison of quality and price. Play to your strengths and not weakness of your competition. Let your prospect draw their own conclusions from a well-presented comparison.

6. Rejection is a natural aspect of sales process so don’t take it personally. Learn from rejection, use it as a feedback mechanism and look for ways to improve your presentation. Salespeople who take rejection personally lack perseverance and seldom make sale. Sales is a numbers game pure and simple. As a professional baseball player, if you can average four hits out of ten times at bat you are heading for Hall of Fame. Research indicates that in sales you can expect your prospect to say no five times before they buy. With this in mind, realize that with every sales rejection you receive, you are one step closer to making sale!

I know this works from personal experience in successfully pursuing goals like a skydiving World Record. NASA has verified this method of fear management through controlled studies of astronauts.

If you find you are significantly distracted and having difficulty concentrating because of terrorist attacks or continuing threats, you may want to seek assistance. There is no shame in taking care of yourself. The only shame is in significantly hampering your performance by not seeking it. You would not expect your car to function well after a major accident. Similarly, after trauma we all have experienced in last year, it may be time to treat yourself to some “service.”

Focus on Your Goals

And finally, keep your goals in focus. If you need to revise your goals – do. They need to be relevant. But keep them foremost in your mind. By keeping focused on your personal and professional goals, you will keep yourself on track. And there is another benefit. You will be undermining goals of those who would love nothing more than for us to lose touch with our greatness – as individuals and as a country.

© Jim McCormick 2002