Savvy business owners/managers know that REJECTION should not be accepted as a normal component of selling. The problem is most do not know how to stem the rejection tide and, held hostage by its power, watch helplessly as their sales people suffer more rejection today than at any other time in recent memory. Why? David Sandler, founder of Sandler Training, summed it up this way (and I paraphrase) … Sales people are rejected because they’re not respected.

Sandler could not have been more right. Decades of traditional, adversarial selling, where employers have encouraged their sales people to walk into offices uninvited, to use every trick in the book to close sales and given their salespeople poor, if any, sales support has finally backfired. Today’s sophisticated buyers are fed up with traditional selling tactics. In today’s time-starved markets buyers have little time, patience or respect for traditional salesmen regardless of their gender. Today’s buyers need trusted advisors, partners, allies not more me-centred salespeople. The antidote for a virus I call adversarial selling, the cure that can quell rejection and turn salespeople into buyer-allies, sits captive within the walls of corporate North America. The antidote is called Sales Support.

Sales Support embraces a long overdue concept that brings salespeople, prospects and buyers together as Powerful Allies. Sales Support is a decompression process that carefully guides salespeople out of the dark ages of adversarial selling by combining ally-training and a support system called a marketing mix. A marketing mix is an amalgam of carefully dispensed marketing components that may include, but are not limited by: advertising, promotion, networking, social media, public relations, collaborative selling, prospect qualification skills and corporate management that truly puts the needs and wants of their prospects and customers first. Collaborative selling replaces traditional selling and requires extensive management and staff training … and demands commitment to the regular sales staff debriefing and maintenance of their moral support.

Sales Support should be among the criteria necessary to be granted ISO certification.

Teach salespeople to become Powerful Allies … back them up with sound Sales Support … work these two concepts hard and your salespeople will not only gain the respect they need and mitigate rejection. They will produce the sales your company needs in a far shorter period of time.