I started my career as an engineer and in those days it seemed to me like the salespeople had the easiest job in the company. They didn’t have to keep up with technology. They didn’t need to pass a test to become licensed. Whenever clients asked really tough questions, they brought the engineers in to answer them. It seemed all they did was talk to people, take them to lunch and occasionally play golf. What could be easier? Then they made me a salesman and it seemed like the toughest job in the world. Talking to people, which seemed easy from afar, was a struggle. No one wanted to talk to me when I got into sales. Solving problems was easy when I was an engineer. I discovered that asking the questions to uncover a significant problem that needed to be solved on a sales call was much more difficult. Prospects were guarded. Telling the sales department or the client how much it was going to cost to solve a problem was easy when I was an engineer.  Discussing how much money the prospect had available to solve a problem on a sales call was much more difficult. It took me years to discover that my initial thought was correct – selling is easy. Not only that, it is fun. The elite sales people, the top 6%, do it effortlessly. So why was it so difficult for me in the beginning and for the vast majority of salespeople on an ongoing basis? The answer lies in our belief systems and other hidden weaknesses that we possess.

Your mother told you thousands of times not to talk to strangers, but your sales manager tells you to talk to 20 strangers per week. Is it any wonder that we have call reluctance or that we feel stress when prospecting? You learned at an early age that discussing someone else’s money situation in public was not polite. Is it a surprise that salespeople avoid discussing money with a prospect as long as possible? As humans we all need approval but the inexperienced salesperson feels internal pressure when she seeks it from prospects on sales calls. That pressure causes her to skip over the tougher questions she knows she should ask, so as to have a better chance of being liked by the prospect. What makes selling difficult is the erroneous self-limiting beliefs we have which make asking simple questions seem difficult. Hidden weaknesses cause us to avoid doing what we know we must do. So what is the secret to effortless high performance in sales? It is really no secret at all. You just have to identify the self-limiting beliefs that get in your way and eliminate them or change them. It is not easy but the emotional energy you put into changing the belief systems you have is repaid many times over with stress free effortless high performance in sales.

Fear of rejection is one of the most common weaknesses among salespeople and it is a major reason people give for avoiding the selling profession altogether. It is closely related to what psychologists call the abandonment fear. Abandonment fear is a primal response all humans have to some degree. In ancient and pre-historic times if you were abandoned or rejected by your community you most likely starved to death or lost the protection from predators that the community afforded. But that fear is misplaced in the modern day salesperson. Nobody starves to death or is eaten by a saber-toothed tiger because a prospect decided not to buy from them.

Salespeople who fear rejection make fewer sales calls because they spend a lot of time working up the courage to make the call. Then, if they are not successful, they spend time recovering from the experience. They take a break. They analyze what just happened. They rationalize the situation. They blame themselves. They blame the company or outside factors like the economy the government or the Federal Reserve Bank. Eventually they make another call, usually with lowered expectations and the ensuing unhappy result. They repeat this over and over expending vast amount of emotional energy in the process.

Salespeople without fear of rejection make one call after the other with little or no downtime between calls. They realize that the prospect’s decision not to buy from them or to talk to them or to meet with them is not personal. The prospect may be busy or not have a need.  What seems like rejection may be due to any one of several other factors. But it is not an attack on the salesperson. They are not going to starve because this one person could not see the benefit of doing business with or talking to them. They know that there are other prospects right around the corner to talk to. They also know that outside factors have little to do with their overall success. Sure the economy, the government and even their own company create situations they have to deal with. But they adjust their approach and go on selling and succeeding anyway. They also realize that sometimes they make a mistake in their approach or they miss cues that the prospect gives them and they lose an opportunity to business due to their own failure in that instance. But they realize the mistake and move on trying not to make that mistake again. They know that no one is perfect – not even them.

So the lesson for today is to increase the amount of rejection you experience. If you do, your sales will increase dramatically and the rejection isn’t about you anway. Watch this video to understand more about how that works.

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Dan Caramanico is a salesforce development expert and he is the author of Attributes of The Optimal Salesperson® One of Selling power’s top ten books for 2010 and Optimal Selling, Sales Conversations of the Optimal Salesperson.

I am not talking about an arrogant confrontational communication style that many people use quite naturally. I am talking about salespeople who avoid confrontation of all types at all times. Salespeople who are always totally agreeable come across as weak and more importantly waste a lot of time with unqualified prospects. Here are two occasions when you need to confront a prospect:

1. When the prospect contradicts himself subtly as follows: “Our operations department is losing money.” … Five minutes later, “We are happy with the way things are.” This example is rather blatant and it is obvious that you need to confront the prospect by saying “… I guess I don’t understand how you can be happy when you are losing money.” Blatant as the example is, salespeople let the prospects slide with contradictions like this every day.

2. When the prospect says something mildly positive about your product or service; such as “What you have looks very interesting.” If you take that and keep moving, you will soon find yourself writing a quote for an unqualified prospect. The optimal salesperson pushes back with “really, … why?”.

Both of these examples are mild forms of confrontation and yet they will change the nature of the conversation, yield prospects that are more qualified or eliminate them before you have a chance to waste any time or money on them. This 1-minute video will show you how a healthy dose of skepticism is invaluable.