The resilience of the sales agent: how to turn failure into opportunity

It's rarely mentioned. Yet resilience is an essential asset in the sales profession: it enables you to turn failures into opportunities to achieve success. In their day-to-day work, salespeople inevitably have to deal with rejections, failures and tense situations. A good capacity for resilience helps them to bounce back after a difficult ordeal and to learn from their experiences. Here's how resilience helps commercial agents move forward and succeed in their profession. 

Commercial resilience illustrates the ability of sales people to overcome setbacks, to be persistent and to keep moving forward despite difficulties. Good resilience means actively adapting to challenges. It means turning every difficulty into an opportunity to learn and progress. In this respect, it is easy to understand that business resilience is not innate: it is acquired with experience, but also thanks to the methods developed to better accept, analyse and overcome failure. 

Accepting failure is the first essential step towards commercial resilience. In the sales profession, rejections are numerous and inevitable. Being told ‘no’ by a customer or failing to achieve a sales objective can be a difficult experience. However, resilience means not seeing failure as an end in itself, but rather as an occasional and normal stage in the sales process. 

For example, a sales agent might say to themselves: ‘Today I've had 5 rejections, but I've contacted 15 potential customers. I've made progress towards my objective! 

Accepting failure means understanding that every setback is an integral part of the sales process. Failures do not define a sales agent's competence. On the contrary, they provide fantastic opportunities to improve! Failing to convince a prospect may reveal the need to deepen your knowledge of the product or improve your presentation. By accepting this, sales agents can give themselves the means to progress. 

Have you accepted failure? Now it's time to analyse it and understand the reasons why. This is essential if you are to avoid making the same mistakes again, and define a better strategy for the future. This analysis covers a number of areas: the sales approach, listening to the customer's needs, how the meeting was conducted, and also the economic context. 

Understanding the reasons for a failure requires lucidity and the ability to question oneself. Rather than blaming yourself or looking for someone to blame, it's essential to ask yourself the right questions: what went wrong? What needs to be improved for the next attempt? It's a good idea to involve your customers in this process: it gives you the benefit of an outside perspective, which can often be very constructive. Understanding failure is a key step towards continuous improvement and renewed success. 

Business resilience also requires the ability to adapt. A failure often reveals a weakness in the sales approach or in the strategy for approaching the customer. Sometimes, the market is changing: a method that was successful in the past may no longer meet customers' expectations today. 

Adapting your strategy may mean adjusting certain elements, such as your sales pitch, the way you promote the benefits of a product or the way you manage customer relations. Being able to reinvent yourself enables sales agents to bounce back and remain competitive. For example, an agent who frequently encounters objections about price can choose to emphasise added value, long-term benefits or the level of guarantee. In this way, they demonstrate the relevance of their offer, over and above the selling price. A change of approach likely to transform a refusal into an opportunity. 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are invaluable tools for monitoring and evaluating sales performance. However, when a failure occurs, it is sometimes appropriate to re-evaluate the KPIs in order to determine more appropriate objectives. Indeed, ambitions that are too high can seem unattainable and become a source of discouragement for sales agents. 

By way of illustration, a sales agent who is finding it difficult to win over new customers may choose to focus his or her efforts on developing new services for existing customers, thereby strengthening their loyalty over the long term 

Overcoming failure is not easy. It requires effort: in particular, working on your state of mind or managing your emotions better. Personal resilience can be complemented by techniques that help build self-confidence and psychological resilience. 

• Adopt a growth mindset: it's essential to believe that skills develop over time. This constructive attitude ensures that you don't become discouraged in the face of adversity. Every challenge should be seen as an opportunity to grow in your field. 
• Managing stress and emotions: sales is a high-pressure profession, and it's important to know how to manage stress. For example, relaxation techniques such as breathing and meditation help you to cope better with difficult periods. Not taking rejection personally also helps to create the distance you need to move forward without getting discouraged. 
• Find support: sharing feedback with your peers, network or managers helps you put things into perspective and benefit from an outside perspective. Even informal discussions can offer comfort and bring up new ideas for moving forward. 
• Set achievable and progressive objectives: for example, focusing on daily or weekly objectives often gives the employee the feeling of progressing step by step. A policy of small steps that strengthens commitment and endurance. 

Today, resilience is an essential pillar of sales performance. For the sales agent, resilience is not simply a lever for overcoming obstacles, but a vector for performance and progress, both personal and professional. Accepting failure, understanding the mechanisms involved and adapting your strategy are essential steps to progress in this demanding profession. The ability to re-evaluate your objectives and work on your personal resilience means that sales agents can turn every failure into an opportunity to improve, so that they can confidently build on their future successes. 

Are you a successful sales agent in the IT equipment and services or leasing sectors? Would you like to become a sales agent? 

Econocom, the European leader in digital business transformation, is recruiting sales agents throughout Europe.