Resilience: A Key Quality for Sales Success

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same…

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

– Rudyard Kipling 

Kipling’s Poem ‘If’ talks about the need to treat triumph and disaster, success and failure as two imposters that will visit from time to time with the same level of balance. 

Or, if you prefer, “On Any Given Sunday, you’re gonna win, or you’re gonna lose…”Al Pacino’s famous monologue to his American Football team, in Any Given Sunday…

If there was ever a role that introduced these two imposters or the two opposing outcomes, often non-exclusively, it’s sales. In any sales role, you experience the highs of a deal won and the lows of rejections and have to learn to deal with both.

Working with a group of young apprentices starting out in their career in sales, we have tried hard to help them cope with the ups and downs but develop a great deal of personal resilience. 

Our current group are about to complete their 12-month IT Salesperson Level 3 apprenticeship. Currently, they are all enjoying a level of success; their pipelines are strong, the brands they deal with are well-known, and they have all earned the respect of their colleagues through their drive and determination. 

But it wasn’t always this way, as anyone that works in sales like myself knows. 

Many times this year, I’ve sat with them and listened to them tell me the reasons this wasn’t for them, they had to go, it was too much, and they couldn’t carry on. 

They were taken on as a group of four, they are a tight-knit group of friends as much as colleagues, they work in close proximity and each shares in the successes and failures of the others. This built strong bonds but also presented a challenge as watching others succeed when you aren’t is tough to take – even if, like me, you have been selling for 20 years.

It can still hurt me every now and again when I think everyone else is being more successful than me. I question myself, what am I doing wrong, why can’t I get there? And that’s been the biggest challenge for these guys this year.

Setting targets

Sales can be cut-throat. Success or failure, triumph or disaster is measured in numbers. Targets, volumes, margins; we have all worked on quotas or ratios – the number of calls needed to close a deal and the level of revenue needed from each one brought in. Often there is no hiding place, and when you see a colleague – friend or not – having better, more productive conversations with prospects, it can be difficult to stay motivated. 

Using an apprenticeship to train this group really helped us to slow this process down and set a different type of target. We encouraged the team to develop their product knowledge, shadow senior colleagues and hone their skills over five to six months before hitting the phones to ensure that they had built a solid foundation of sales skills, knowledge and behaviours to give them the best chance of success. 

Being resilient 

We told them on day one that, while sales can bring massive rewards and lots of highs, there were probably going to be times where they felt really, really low. The one thing to remember is to stay determined do not stop what you are doing, no matter how bad or how great you feel, because fortunes change quickly in sales. Each business has its own timeline- they may purchase straight away or come back to you in six months- and the thing is, you never know and often can’t control it. But as long as you are out there talking to enough people, you will get the rewards you want in time.

We were also committed to supporting this journey as we had confidence they would achieve success in the end. 

Resilience is the ability to brush ourselves off after getting knocked down, learn from our mistakes instead of repeating them, and rebuff rejection instead of internalising negativity. It’s also what sets high-performing sales professionals apart from the also-rans. At Remit, I am very proud to say that we have a team of sales apprentices exceeding expectations and have developed a level of self-resilience that will set them up for very successful sales careers.