How To Become a Better Salesman

There are many things which make up a good salesman: you need to be able to talk to people, you need to have confidence, you have to be persuasive, and you must know your business. But there is one aspect to becoming a better salesman that nearly all the teaching manuals and books miss. This is a shame since it's probably the most important quality a person needs to become a great salesman and it has little to do with anything you say to a customer.

It has to do only with you.

The quality I'm referring to is being able to hear this word over and over again: "NO!"

You must be scratching your head and wondering what on earth I'm talking about, but trust me that this is important. You see, even great salesmen fail more often than they succeed. In fact, the acceptable statistics for salemen are that even if you're good, you only have about a 10% success rate. This means that you only make 1 sell for each 10 people you approach; 1 Yes for every 9 No's.

Most people simply get discouraged by these frequent rejections, lose heart and confidence which lowers their selling abilities even further. If you wish to be a better salesman, you need to break free of this notion and to learn to take these No's in the right way.

Here's the way to think about it: For each 10 people you only make 1 sale, right? So instead of thinking of the 9 rejections as failures, which can easily lead to demoralization, think about each of them as a 10% success. I mean, for each person you talk to you make 10% of a complete sale since 1 person in 10 will end up buying. When you think about it this way, you have no problem of hearing the occasional NO which will lead to increased confidence and in turn bigger selling success.