How cold or warm are your calls can be best judged by the call duration and the number of questions you ended-up answering, and if the clients aren’t responding to follow-up calls, one of the reasons could be that they didn’t like “what & how it was said”, rejections teach if we start looking at the basic part of human behavior - we don’t talk to people if the talk doesn’t interest us.

As a salesperson, it’s not under your control to create the best product ever, but it is very much in your control to fit it as the best available product in the buyer’s mind.

The choice should be to prepare yourself mentally towards convincing the customer, before deciding to offer the product, most sales is lost in half backed efforts, indecisiveness and lack of self-conviction.

Learn to give some time to a “No”.When your client refuses the proposal, wait a while - may be a few seconds or minutes, let the feeling of denial sink into yours as well as their mind, now ask for a reason for denial and work towards changing their perception. Immediately defying the customers becomes an argument not a sales pitch, where each party will get busy in proving their point & completely ignoring the basic need.

To be a successful salesperson never act like a salesperson, never force your targets on clients, it’s all about earning the trust by creating an impression that you are on their side.

Buying & selling is not a process, but a story, the base of this story is “need”. Need arising out of necessity or a feeling to own / experience that product / service. The customer narrates the base (need) of the story, but how well the story develops is left to the storytelling (sales pitch) skills of salesperson, sometimes the storytelling leaves such an impression that the customer has no choice but to be a part of that story.

You learn more sales techniques from rejections than you can ever learn from approvals - provided you analyze the reason for the rejections; most of the time it’s not the cost involved but your failure to understand the need & create the utility.

When people stop buying from us, do not blame the market conditions straightaway, we must first analyze a change in the buying behavior due to market conditions, maybe the luxury / exposure is not part of their wish list, maybe they only “buy” strictly out of need, and what they need is fulfillment of their need in a cost-effective way.

When we talk about smart selling, it’s not exclusive, anyone can be better at smart selling, if only we come out of self-illusion zone created due to a successful month-end scorecard, we fail the minute we start paying more attention to successful sales campaigns while ignoring the unsuccessful ones. Sometimes things do fall into our nets, but smart selling is all about paying equal attention to things which escaped the net.