What does it take to become an exceptional salesperson?
Selling is a contact sport, by which I mean it can be extremely tough, challenging and like it or not your nose will inevitably get bloodied again and again. Most new recruits to either sales prospecting or selling don’t last more than a few years, as it takes an exceptional person to get to the very top and stay there year after year.
Even exceptional sales people will take many knocks on their way to the top, but then perhaps it’s the willingness to keep risking the knocks, and having the intelligence to view them as learning opportunities and not failures, that makes people exceptional. If that’s what being exceptional is, then the good news is we can all be exceptional, so long as we have the guts to keep doing what it takes, for as long it takes.
Let’s have no illusions, selling is competitive, and there are no prizes for coming second. So to become a great salesperson we have to aim for the top, which means being gutsy and stepping out of our self limiting comfort zones each and every day.