The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible pdfdrive com

An Unproductive Day
You wouldn’t want to interrupt prospects when they are going for lunch.
Therefore, you don’t make any calls after 11:30 AM. You go and have lunch
with your friends, go shopping, get your car washed, or kill time.
Time passes. You certainly don’t want to call on people immediately after
they get back from lunch. It might disturb their digestion. So you make up a few
more excuses and rationalizations, and you don’t make your next call until 2:00
or 3:00 PM. Soon it’s 3:30, then 4:00, and of course, everybody’s on their way
home, aren’t they?
You don’t want to go out and bother people late in the afternoon while they
are preparing to wrap up for the day. Instead, you go back to the office to
commiserate with the other salespeople who are gathering there like survivors
after an accident and talk about what a tough day you’ve had.
There is the story of the two salesmen who go back to the office at the end of
the day. One says, “Boy, did I ever have a lot of good interviews today!”
The other one says, “Yeah, I didn’t sell anything either.”
Can you identify with any of these behaviors? They are the favorite practices
and excuses of salespeople in the bottom 20 percent of money earners in their
fields.

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Increase Traveling Time
Another way that salespeople avoid the possibility of failure and rejection is
by spreading out their sales calls geographically. Such a salesperson makes one
call at one end of town and makes her second call in the afternoon at the other
end of town. This gives her a nice solid hour of driving in between, which allows
her to pretend that she is working, when in reality, she is just putting off getting
face-to-face with a prospect.
The fears of failure and rejection, which lower your self-esteem, quickly
become the major obstacles to success in sales.