Fearing Rejection? Sales Training Can Reveal The Truth

By Author: Knocking on doors, cold calling techniques cold ca
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Knocking on doors, cold calling techniques cold calling on the telephone, these are all areas that sales training courses can help you with, but the bigger question has to be, is there a better way?

I do not mean is there a better way to learn these skills than attending sales training courses, I mean is there a better way to get new business and sales than cold calling suspects who may or may not have a need for your product.

My background is selling life insurance and I recall my early days of selling. My manager brought me in to the office on my first day of work and stood up with a chart and easel and explained to me what life insurance was and how to sell it, this constituted to my first ever sales training course. I was then given a book which had all the rates and costs and told to go out and sell. I was 21 years of age and had received no previous sales training. In fact this was the only sales training I had for the next 5 years.

I asked my manager where do I start and his answer to me was the next person you see,
Just start talking to them and see do they have any interest-- so much for ...
... sales training I thought. Well you can imagine how difficult it was to pluck up enough courage and actually go and speak to someone about Life insurance, but I really had no choice jobs were hard to get and I needed to earn some money so I had to go and ask some one to buy.

Much to my amazement, it wasn't really that hard, of course loads of people said no and of course I made tons and tons of mistakes and I can recall the sweat running down my back with fear for the first number of calls. But you know the strange thing about it no one was ever rude to me, no one swore at me, no one got a gun or threatened to kill me.
In fact the worse thing that happened to me was people said ‘no thank you we have enough'. Eventually though some one said yes and bought. That was the beginning to my highly successful career in sales, obviously the sales training course worked?

I began to realise the more people that I asked the more ‘no thank you we are happy with what we have' replies I received, but amazingly although most people said no I did find some people who did have an interest and eventually bought.

I then suddenly realised that out of knocking on 20 doors and speaking to the correct person, I was able to gain some form of interest in the product with about 4 people and from that 4 people I usually ended up selling to 1 of them. I did not know whether this was good or bad as no such mention of these kind of statistics were ever mentioned on my sales training course.

When I asked my manager about this he just answered—‘Just carry on doing what you are doing, the only statistic you need to know is how many people you need to speak with to get a sale, then work out how much that sale is worth to you'.

So I carried on doing what I was doing and sure enough people continued to say yes and more people continued to say no. Then one night, even though my manager had told me not to worry about statistics I sat at home and worked out that my average commission cheque was £200.

I then realised that this sales job regardless of the sales training I had received was a fairly good job. If I could go and speak to 20 people and get one sale worth £200 it really meant that each person I spoke to whether they said yes or no was worth £20 to me.

When I look back on the sales training I received from my manager I laugh, because in reality it was pathetic, however understanding how many people I need to contact to get a sale and the value of that sale was like a golden nugget.

I then realised that every no I received was still worth £20 to me. Cold call selling and the fear of rejection is really not hard when you realise every rejection is worth money to you, I just wish my manager had mentioned this on my initial 2 hour introduction to sales training course