Talk: Building Resilience in Sales — Paul Kenny

Paul Kenny (Ocean Learning) returned to BoS in March 2020 to talk about Building Resilience in Sales Teams at BoS Europe Online and how some new approaches have proven successful at creating winning mindsets amongst salespeople. Particularly in changing or challenging circumstances such as what we’ve been experiencing in the past eighteen months.

The entire recording including links to the original slide deck and full transcript are below.

What to do When Sales Confidence Takes a Battering

Anyone who’s spent any time working in sales know that it can be a seriously ego depleting activity. As Paul candidly puts it:

It takes a tonne of energy. It affects our ability to maintain any resilience. Our confidence takes a battering.

And in sales the confidence that we need to do the job is often eroded away by a whole bunch of different things. Things like rejection. In sales we have they are the everyday situation of being told no many, many times more than we’re told, yes.

There’s a kind of new version of this, this rejection now, which is the, in the last 10 years or so where people get really interested in a product, and then just melt away. They stopped returning our calls or our emails. As a salesperson, the feeling of being left with somebody who you had told your boss was a good prospect, who’s just now disappeared and you start to question whether you are good enough whether you said something wrong, or you didn’t say something right enough. And all of that plays on your mind and starts to eat away at your confidence.

Rejection, targets, unforeseen circumstance, more rejection — while these things are very much part and parcel of working in sales this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to do about them.

In this talk Paul Kenny takes us through a few new techniques that have been recently, and successfully, tried and tested by various sales teams to improve the mindset and mental health of salespeople working day-in-day-out in the face of these challenges.

Full Talk from BoS Europe Online 2020

Additional Resources

Read the full transcript of Paul Kenny’s talk and view the slide deck. You can also find more talks by Paul Kenny and other speakers on various topics, including sales, in our talks archive.