Keeping At It
JK Rowling, Agatha Christie, Walt Disney, Colonel Saunders, Steven Spielberg, Albert Einstein, The Beatles, Dr. Seuss. All selling new ideas, all rejected countless times. How to keep plugging through all of this tiresome, cold rejection?
“You might never fail on the scale I did,” Rowling told the Harvard graduating class. “But it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
We’ve seen how important grit, optimism and a willingness to take risks are for the entrepreneur. After a few knockdowns, it can be useful to sit back and reframe your sales approach.
In his recent book: To Sell is Human, author Daniel Pink addresses how uncomfortable some of us are with the whole notion of selling. He includes a word cloud of the 25 most common adjectives and interjections people offer when they think about sales or selling.
‘Selling’ Pink writes, ‘makes many of us uncomfortable and even a bit disgusted (“ick,” “yuck,” “ugh”) in part because we believe that its practice revolves around duplicity, dissembling, and double-dealing.’ Yet, there is no business with no selling.
In referencing current research, Pink takes us from the old sales ABC’s (Always be Closing) to the new ABC’s of Persuasion.
A = Attunement
B = Buoyancy
C = Clarity
Here he describes the ABC’s in a short animation:
http://www.danpink.com/ac/rsa-shorts-the-abcs-of-persuasion/
