Stress is one of the most detrimental things to a salesperson. When you’re stressed, when you feel extremely anxious, it makes it hard not just to to get out and sell, but it makes it hard to be on top of your game in respect to how clearly you can strategize, how clearly you can think, how quickly you can respond to objections or questions from customers, how clearly you can make effective decisions as to what to do at each moment of the day….and the list goes on and on and on. Actually, when you’re stressed, when you’re anxious, if it’s severe, it can actually cause physical affects too. It can make you feel sick, you can lose your appetite, which will then translate to not eating and not having enough energy for the day.

There’s a difference between good stress and bad stress. So this week I want to focus on how to manage good stress and how to get rid of bad stress.

One of the things I wanted to bring up this morning was probably something that a lot of sales people don’t think about as causing stress…time spent on coming up with elaborate excuses and stories for something that happened to your customer or something bad that happened. Let’s say that you or your customer places an order and suddenly you realize that you forgot to follow up and finalize it…so your customer is not getting their order on time.

Well, that’s a really big problem because if your customer is expecting these products from you that you’ve promised them and then they’re not going to get them, you failed to deliver.

A lot of salespeople or managers and even executives and companies tend to want to pass the blame. They want to come up with a good story so that it doesn’t make them as individuals look bad, but instead passes blame to the company. I think a lot of people spend time thinking up elaborate stories and complicated scenarios to try to make it sound like it wasn’t their fault that something bad happpened. That causes a lot of stress and anxiety.

Realize what you’re actually doing…you’re lying to your customer.

If you’re lying to your customer, you’re going to have to keep concocting stories and fabrications to continue to cover up that lie and that is going to cause a serious amount of stress.

So that brings me to the importance of being honest and taking responsibility for mistakes that are made. If you can give simple, honest responses and admit when you’re wrong, not only will it help your customers see that you’re a real person, but it’ll help your customer trust you more and it’ll help you act based upon the truth about what is actually going on. You’re not going to have to spend all this mental time concocting stories and all this time covering things up. If you made a mistake, you need to admit it. Take responsibility for it and fix it.

It’ll help you and it’ll really help your customer.

So going into this week, try to think about it. Are there any things, are there any situations that you’re facing where you’re trying to come up with stories to cover your tracks? If so, it’s important that you stop, be honest, take responsibility and watch your mental stress go down.

Remove one of the most vicious cycling anxious thoughts from your mind.

I really hope that it helps you. I really hope that it’ll help you have an even more successful week.

If you want to fast track your way towards living life, eliminating stress and closing more sales, get a free copy of the living sales manual.

Go to www.livingsalesbook.com. All you have to do is pay for shipping and I’ll get you a free copy of the book.

Happy Selling!