The sales profession can be transformational. And, the transformation can take place when someone embraces the opportunity to take the risk necessary for success—at least once.

And when they do, and they overcome the social, strategic and technical barriers required to achieve real sales success, no one can take that away from them.

The average individual makes approximately seven career changes during his working life. If plotted on a graph, it would resemble not a straight line, but would look more like a slowly rising roller-coaster course. Each change is preceded by a hesitation step, a backward move before the course restarts at a new point and begins heading upward again.

Seth Godin talks about these backward steps in his book “The Dip” as natural lulls that tend to occur in someone’s performance just before being projected to a new, higher level of performance. His thesis being that, sadly, many people choose to bail out on an effort because of “the dip” just before they would have made a breakthrough to the next level in their current pursuit.

These “grass is greener” job changes are difficult professionally, and are made even more difficult considering the stress that is placed on a family as they adjust and readjust to the financial or even location changes.

A common mistake that many people tend to make is to forget that life has a beginning and an end. They allow their work to consume as much as 75 percent of their time, striving for a destination they never attain, let alone define depriving themselves of many of life’s abundant gifts. How many are struggling individuals who find themselves sitting by the roadside of life watching the winners go by, thinking, “There, but if I had stretched just a bit, go I”?

The secret is to discover early in life how unnecessary it is to start over again and again. Instead, be smart enough to search out and grab hold of a vehicle that will propel you toward your goal.

To live your life as a champion salesperson, you have to go through the same training process as other top professionals whether they are athletes or astronauts, firefighters or fighter pilots. Training conditions you to act and react in certain ways. This conditioning becomes a way of life based on rules, principles and systems developed to ensure your success.

One of the most important Sandler conditioning principles is maintain a healthy self-esteem. You can’t be a champion—work effectively and enjoy long-term success—if you don’t feel good about yourself.

Ironically, you fill your day with activities that have the potential to chip away at your self-esteem. You make prospecting calls on people who either don’t want to talk to you, or if they do, don’t have the time when you call. You make presentations to people who should buy, but won’t … can buy, but don’t. You hear “no” more often than you hear “yes.” It's one rejection after another; what can you do?

You must be conditioned to not take personally the interactions you have with prospects and customers. If they reject your product, service, or company, it’s not a rejection of you. And, in the rare instance when you don’t click with a prospect and they do reject you, so what? Maybe they don’t get along with anyone. Maybe they were having a bad day before you showed up on the scene and rejecting you is the only way for them to feel good about themselves. By rejecting you and ruining your day, their day is now better by comparison.

Your training must condition you to become mentally and emotionally tough. You must be able to accept a no, even from those who should have said yes, and then move on. If there’s a lesson to be learned from the failure, learn it, apply it, and subsequently benefit from it. It’s part of the training.

If you don’t quit, you will live your life as a champion.

© Copyright 2010 Marr Professional Development Corporation

Joe Marr is a public speaker, sales and management consultant and trainer, and runs the Sandler Sales Institute at 501 Avis Drive in Ann Arbor. To get more information on Selling Smart training sessions being conducted this season, call 734-821-4830 or visit his website at www.sandlerannarbor.com