The following is an excerpt from The Sales Survival Handbook. You can order the book here.
By now you have a pretty good idea of what you can expect in sales. You’ve learned some sales slang and heard about the good and the bad. The last thing to understand before starting your sales journey is how going from a boring life as a salaried employee or college student to the high-paced world of sales is going to affect you.
There is a psychological process that takes place when someone experiences sales for the first time called the five stages of sales grief. Not all salespeople experience all five stages, and some may experience them in different ways than others, but all sales reps go through at least one of these stages in their career.
Denial
Denial is the first of the five stages of sales grief. Once you’re past your initial training and are given a sales quota, you may try to make yourself believe that this isn’t actually happening. Many new salespeople approach sales in an overly casual way, perhaps convincing themselves that they’ll either be able to hit their goals without putting in too much effort or that missing a goal isn’t really a big deal. But once you’ve been given an actual quota you’re required to hit, you’ll quickly discover that denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, where the salespeople probably sell miniature pyramids and ancient jewelry.
Anger
Anger is a necessary stage in the sales healing process. You may be angry at the quality of the leads your company is giving you or angry with yourself that you’re not performing as well as you know you can. Let the anger flow through you, but don’t take it out on your family members or on your customers. Harness the anger to motivate yourself to work harder. Make 50 extra calls, follow up more aggressively with prospects you’ve pitched in the past, or take your biggest competitors at work and sign them up for hundreds of magazine subscriptions to throw off their game.
Bargaining
Once you get to this stage of sales grief, you’re halfway home. Bargaining can take many forms as you go through the sales grieving process. Sometimes you will try to bargain with your boss for a better compensation plan, which can be difficult to pull off. Other times you’ll bargain with the gatekeeper so you’ll be connected to the decision maker. But once you’re regularly bargaining with customers, you’ll know that you’re coming into your own as a salesperson, and you’ll start to experience the more normal feelings that veteran salespeople experience regularly: frustration and stress.
Depression
After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present and manifests itself as a sales depression. A sales depression usually takes the form of a slump: a prolonged period of time where you’re performing worse than usual and worse than you can afford to be in order to hit your sales goals. Salespeople can go through many slumps in their career, and when you’re in a slump it feels like you’re never going to get out. But successful salespeople understand that every slump is temporary and have taught themselves tricks to help them bounce back. Some of these tricks include taking a different route to work, getting back to the basics, or spending an entire night drinking before work in what’s often referred to as a slump buster. (See chapter 3, “Prospecting.”)
Acceptance
Acceptance is the final stage of sales grief and is often confused with the notion of being “always excited” about working in sales. This is not the case. Most people have perpetual doubts about whether they want to or are meant to stay in sales. We may never fully embrace this reality, but we do learn to live with it. The truth is that few people in the world naturally love their jobs, but of the ones who do and aren’t just lying about it, many have simply taught themselves to be grateful and enjoy what they do for a living. The same goes for the most successful salespeople. They may not absolutely love what they’re doing, but they’ve committed themselves to being the best they can possibly be. Their mentality is that as long as they’re doing it, they might as well try to do it well. Once you’ve reached this stage of sales grief and accepted and embraced your new career, you have truly become a salesperson, so feel free to celebrate by cutting the tip off your tie.
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