How to Master the Art of Selling: 6 Powerful Tips

Selling your services is an essential part of running your business. However, selling can be an emotional roller coaster and you’re often your own worst enemy. If you feel shame, fear and anxiety about selling, here are six powerful mindset tips to help set you on the path to success.

1. Be Ready for Rejection

When it comes to selling, you’ll always hear the word “no” more than you hear a “yes.” It’s so important that you don’t allow yourself to be disheartened by this or take it personally, because rejection is a critical part of selling your services. There’s just no way of avoiding it.

Over time, you will hear “yes” more and more often, but you’ll never have a 100% success rate. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world, from Richard Branson to Bill Gates, have experienced countless rejections. The key to their success has been accepting it rather than letting it deter them.

2. Don’t Take it Personally

To build upon the previous point, talented sales people know not to take rejection personally. The truth is that rejection is not a personal attack. A prospective client simply doesn’t know you well enough for their rejection to be personal. Often, they’re just not the right client for you - and that’s okay.

3. Attach a Value to Your Tasks

When you’ve faced several rejections in a row, you might feel like giving up. You may feel like trying another prospect is pointless. Attaching an economic value to your efforts illuminates why it’s worth persevering. 

Let’s say that it takes ten sales conversations to secure a $10,000 client. Therefore, each conversation is worth $1,000. When you begin to feel despondent and are struggling to find the motivation to continue selling, remember the value of each conversation. This is a really effective strategy for dealing with negativity and self-doubt, and it helps to keep you focused.

4. Set Activity Goals

Ask any successful entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that there’s no such thing as overnight success. Selling is all about building relationships, having conversations and creating brand awareness. This takes time and consistent effort. Focusing on day-to-day sales goals encourages a short-sighted view of success, and in business, it’s all about the bigger picture. Therefore, setting activity goals rather than sales goals will help you to stay consistent and keep you motivated even when your sales numbers aren’t what you’d like them to be.

5. Learn from Your Mistakes - but Don’t Dwell on Them

Mistakes are part of entrepreneurship, and they’re a valuable learning opportunity. However, it certainly doesn’t pay to get hung up on past failures. When you begin to fixate on the bad, it becomes tempting to give up. Just because your last prospect didn’t become a client, doesn’t mean that you should stop building relationships. Dwelling on past failures will affect the quality of your pitch and lead you to write off potential clients without truly giving them a chance

6. Believe in What You Do

It sounds cheesy, but in order to have any kind of sales success, you need to truly believe in the products or services that you provide. When you know that you provide value to your clients, your pitches and conversations will be genuine. If you don’t have this, your prospects will know and they’ll be instantly turned off by it. Selling takes courage and courage requires conviction.

Summary

Selling is about so much more than charisma. In order to have any kind of success in selling your services, you need patience, resilience and a genuine belief in what you do. When you have these factors in place, success will surely follow.