Do You Have the Tenacity to Win at Sales Prospecting?

How tenacious are you when it comes to sales prospecting?

Tenacity is one of the 6 secrets of sales prospecting success.  So far we’ve looked at confidence, follow-through, telephone skills and benefit statements.

Tenacity and the need for a salesperson to have it cannot be understated.  Here’s why:  It’s too easy for salespeople to make up excuses as to why they don’t need to do something.  All of us at one time or another struggle with not having tenacity — it’s just some of us struggle with it more often than others.

Tenacity with regard to sales prospecting is all about not becoming discouraged when something doesn’t go right.  It’s being able to be rejected time and time again.

Keep in mind that if sales prospecting was easy, your potential to make big bucks would simply not exist.   The reason sales can be such a profitable profession is due to rejection and the reality that many people cannot survive in this profession — they don’t have the tenacity.

The way you can develop your tenacity is with how you see things and are willing to accept things.

Many of the top salespeople with whom I have the privilege to interact have a high-level of tenacity.  You see tenacity exhibited in them by the way they refuse to let a comment from a customer or even a string of bad events from a number of customers or prospects dampen their enthusiasm for finding the next sale.

These high-achievers not only have the tenacity to keep going on sales call after sales call, they also are able within calls to keep things moving forward. When most salespeople would say a sales call is over and there is little potential to secure a sale, the high-performer is able to ask just the right question or make the right comment to re-engage the customer.

Are these people successful every time?  Of course not, but over a period of time they will put together enough wins to come out on top.

Tenacity comes from within. It’s the personal drive that moves you forward when everything else is saying to stop.  The comparison I like to use is with running a marathon.  It doesn’t take much to start a marathon, but it takes a runner with tenacity to finish a marathon.

Running a marathon is as much mental as it is physical, and I will argue physical can fade but you can still keep going if you mentally believe.  However, if you fail to believe mentally, there is no way the physical effort will be able to carry you through.

Same thing in sales — you may know the process and you may know your product, but if you don’t know yourself, you won’t be successful.

Copyright 2012, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.