Key strategies for coping with stress in sales

1. CANYOU
BREATHE
UNDERWATER?
RUTA MISIUNAITE considers
key strategies for coping
with stress in sales
16 WINNING EDGE ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
FEATURE | STRESS MANAGEMENT
S
ales is not a walk in a park kind of profession.
It is super-fast paced, extremely high pressure,
and requires incredible levels of resilience to
carry on when things get tough. And things
get tough on a regular basis.
Maybe that’s why the vast majority of sales
professionals, when asked about how they got into new
business development, say that they simply fell into it.
Yours truly included. After all, no-one grows up dreaming
about working in a highly stressful environment.
And yet so many people dedicate their whole lifetime
to sales. Personally, I’m not surprised. Once you’ve fallen,
you fall hard. And fast. Pretty soon you find out if you’ve
got it in you to succeed in sales. The thrill of the chase and
the endorphin rush you get after landing your first deal
gets you hooked in an instant. Without realising it, you
quickly forget about all of the blood, sweat and tears that
go into winning a new account and swiftly move on to
searching relentlessly for another fix. And then you do it
again, and again, and again.Yes, winning new business is
a drug and it’s highly addictive.
Throughout my career, I’ve had the pleasure of
exploring various sales roles – ad hoc projects, mid-
market, key prospects and, most recently, sales
management. Over 2,000 days in sales and there is one
thing I know for sure: things will barely ever go your way.
In a world where business challenges are changing more
rapidly than ever before, there’s either going to be lack of
resource, ridiculous targets that feel so unachievable you
can only laugh about them, or you’re so overwhelmed
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2. WINNING EDGE 17ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
with workload that you simply feel like you’re drowning.
Sure, you could try to power through and hope that
better days and easier targets are just around the corner
– but that is not how the world works.
As I said , sales is not a walk in a park. Often, it seems
like you need to have special superpowers just to get
through the day. And one of those powers is the ability to
breathe underwater.
BREATHING UNDERWATER
A few months ago, I had a conversation with a new starter
who was getting overwhelmed with everything that was
going on in her new role. It was her first sales position
and, naturally, she didn’t know how to manage all the
incoming enquiries that flooded her inbox. A perfectly
normal situation that can be fixed
with a little bit of coaching and
support, right? What made me pause,
though, was my unexpected way of
thinking. When she said that she was drowning
in workload, and asked for my advice on how to manage
it efficiently, the first thing that came to my mind was that
in order to have a successful career in sales, you have to
learn how to breathe underwater. Sink or swim – a
perfect case of professional Darwinism at its best.
Welcome to sales, kid!
Breathing underwater is, of course, humanly
impossible. We humans are simply not built to survive
without oxygen for more than 6 minutes. That’s why
professional divers, rather than spending hours
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3. 18 WINNING EDGE ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
practising how to hold their breath underwater
for as long as possible, invest in quality diving
equipment instead. In sales, we often see people
who are quite clearly drowning in workload but
refuse to change their working habits, ask for
help, or use new tools to become more efficient.
WORKING HABITS THAT
NO LONGER WORK
We’ve all been there.You come into work on a
Monday full of energy and motivation to finally
launch that proactive campaign you’ve been
meaning to kick-start since last quarter. Who
needs caffeine when you have a purpose? That’s
right, nothing can stop you...
You just need to check your inbox quickly in
case anything urgent that came in over the
weekend needs your immediate attention this
morning. Without realising, you switch on the
autopilot and start responding to one email after
another. Instead of doing what you initially set
out to do, you get stuck in the same old routine
of battling the hydra-like inbox, and being pulled
into last minute internal meetings – firefighting
until the end of time.
Ten hours later, you’re the last one left in the
office, chit-chatting with the
cleaners about collecting
coins and how you’re both
this close to winning the
lottery and moving to the
Caribbean. Or maybe it’s just
me. Richard, if you’re reading
this, I miss you and I really
hope you made it.
Unsurprisingly, if you spend your entire day
reacting to incoming queries and events, you will
never get a head start on anything you’re really
passionate about. To turn things around, you
need to begin going about your day differently.
I know, it’s easier said than done. We all know that
old habits die hard, and change in the way you
work does not happen overnight. I’m not going
to pretend that I’ve got it all figured out either,
because sometimes I still find myself staying late
in the office, my inbox is not always empty, and I
tend to procrastinate about some tasks until the
very last minute. We’re all human, after all.
I have, however, invested a lot of time and
effort in figuring out how to develop the right
habits and mindset that help me get closer to my
goals. By implementing them, I have not only got
my workload under control but also achieved
almost every single one of my personal
development objectives over the past 3 years
(speaking of which, if anyone can hook me up
with a TED talk gig before the end of 2020, hit
me up). In this day and age, there are so many
resources you can access to aid your personal
development that it’s hard to keep up, but I am
going to share the top tips that have helped me
get to where I am right now.
1. HAVE A PLAN
One of the Founding Fathers of the US, Benjamin
Franklin, said that failing to plan is planning to
fail. I love that quote (and I’ll be mentioning him
again later). It’s elementary that being in total
control of your time and pipeline are key in
having a successful career in sales. After all, time
is money and yet we seem to be running out of it
more and more these days. There are just not
enough hours in the day.
In addition, if you don’t have a plan, you can’t
track your progress against it and prioritise what
you do accordingly. If you’re not clear what your
priorities are, you will instantly get sucked into
the“urgent”and“needs to get done now”to-do
list vortex with no hope of getting out. Trust me,
as soon as you identify what’s important and
what will get you closer to your goals, your whole
day and workload will easily fall into place.
The tactic that has worked for me the best so
far is called“reverse engineering”. In layman’s
terms, it means that you need to have the end
goal in mind and then plan
backwards. Make a list of key
milestones you need to hit,
write down all of the things
that need to happen in order
make progress against each
goal and create a timeline
within which you need to
achieve it all. Et voila! It’s as simple as that – you
now have a plan.
For example, when you’re thinking about
landing that big account that’s been on your
radar for years, here’s a simple checklist of all
things you need to have figured out:
l When is their current contract due to expire?
l Who are the key stakeholders you need to
ensure you impress?
l What is your client’s decision-making process?
l How long does it take to set up your solution?
l Knowing that, when do you need to get the
signed contracts by?
Taking into consideration all the above, when is
the latest you must engage with your client by?
This sounds like basic information you probably
already have in your head, but unless you use
that intel to build a solid win plan, those business
insights you have been collecting for years might
be effectively useless.
2. CELEBRATE FAILURE
There are very few books I’ve read in my whole
life that I could honestly say changed the way I
look at the world. But Black Box Thinking by
FEATURE | STRESS MANAGEMENT
“if you spend your entire
day reacting to incoming
queries and events, you will
never get a head start”
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4. Matthew Syed is definitely one of them. If you
haven’t read it, I urge you to do so as soon as you
can, because the wisdom carefully packed into its
pages will undoubtedly help you become a
better salesperson. If I were to write a one-
sentence summary of the book it would be
something like this –“Don’t be afraid of failure,
but learn from it.”
Throughout my career in sales, I learnt quickly
that the more I try new things and the more I
learn from my mistakes, the more successful I get.
Whether it’s different cold-
calling tactics, LinkedIn
connection request wording,
or proposal templates, if you
want to keep growing in this
day and age, you simply can’t
afford to stick to the old-
fashioned way of selling that
might have worked in the past. Trying new things
can feel awkward and sometimes downright
cringey, but if you never try, you never know
what works best. If you’re not employing the best
tactics, you’re already behind the competition.
These days, companies are very quick to
celebrate successes, but often shy away from
publicising (even if internally) their losses and,
most importantly, the main reasons behind them.
What a shame and lost opportunity for collective
learning. I am sure a lot of salespeople will be
nodding in agreement when I say that some of
my best and most rewarding pitches were those I
did not actually win.
Of course, it’s great to say that you have just
brought on a brand new account, but personally,
hand-on-heart, my best pitch was the one
after which I was able to say that I turned a
procurement-led price check into a client who
truly believed that our service was the future.
Sure, it did not result in a new revenue stream for
my company in the short term, but it was an
invaluable sales masterclass that helped
accelerate my learning and development, which
certainly would not have happened if I had
scored an easy win instead. Sometimes, we lose
pitches because of things that are out of our
control, but nothing can replace that feeling of
confidence that you’ve done everything you
could to win a client.
For the young sales professionals out there
who have just started out on their journey in this
roller coaster of a profession, I have a piece of
advice. Listen closely. Sales is a marathon, not a
sprint. Things will not always come easy but
please do not give up after your first failure. Be
excited about it. In fact, celebrate your failures
because the more you fail, the more you learn –
and that relentless passion for improvement is
key to being a successful salesperson.
WINNING EDGE 19ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
3. ASK FOR HELP
Salespeople can be real control freaks when it
comes to managing a pitch. They want to be in
charge of everything from start to finish.
I can’t stress this enough: ask for help. The trick
here is to delegate and draw on your experts and
their skills as much as you can, because just like
raising a child, it takes a village to win a new
account. Marketing, business insights, operations,
finance, legal counsel and senior management
– these are just some of the functions within your
business that would be more
than happy to offer support.
After all, salespeople should
only be selling. Some might
argue that we’re not very
good at other things anyway.
If you’re the sales superstar
in your company, asking for
help can feel rather embarrassing and counter-
intuitive. After all, you’ve been doing the job for
years, so surely you’re the one that should be
helping everyone out, not the other way round.
If you’re the newbie, you might feel awkward to
be the one constantly bothering your colleagues
with a million questions on a daily basis. I get it,
because I used to have the exact same thoughts
running through my mind.
Things changed when I found out about a
phenomenon called“the Benjamin Franklin
effect”. The great man used to ask his adversaries
for help in order to turn them into his biggest
fans. The science behind this is simple. Our brains
cannot hate someone after doing them a favour,
so they default to liking that person instead.
Keeping this in mind, it makes sense that asking
for support at work will only help you build closer
relationships and, in return, accelerate your
personal and career development. Remember,
your colleagues and your boss want you to do
well. When people want you to succeed, they are
always happy to help. If that’s not the case, then
you probably need to stop thinking about
changing your working habits and start thinking
about changing your employer...
MINDSET MATTERS
So, here you go, these are the three key elements
that will help you master your first sales
superpower – breathing underwater. Having a
plan, celebrating failure, and asking for help seem
like simple things you can easily implement into
your day-today life, but as I always say, if it was
easy, it wouldn’t be fun.
To make sure that the new habits stick for
longer than a week, you need to have the right
mindset. Mind over matter, as they say. But that’s
a story for another time – make sure you read the
next Winning Edge to find out more.
RUTA MISIUNAITE (LISM) is
senior business development
manager, mid-market, at IRI, which
provides integrated big data,
predictive analytics and
forward-looking insights on
technology platform IRI Liquid
Data. In less than 6 years, she has
progressed from junior
salesperson at IRI to leading her
own team. She is dedicated to
continuous personal
development, and to helping
fellow sales professionals by
sharing her knowledge and
experience in blogs, webinars and,
from now on, WinningEdge
articles.Visit: linkedin.com/in/
ruta-misiunaite
STRESS MANAGEMENT | FEATURE
“The more I try new things
and the more I learn from
my mistakes, the more
successful I get”
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