Sales Lessons from Tommy Boy Part 2
The second lesson we can all take away from Tommy Boy is about perseverance. Tommy was all excited about going on his dad’s sales trip at first. He was motivated to try to take his dad’s place and help save the company. But he quickly realized that being in sales was a lot tougher than he thought it would be. Spade’s character, Richard, was trying to get him to memorize their product’s features so he could pitch to their 
prospects. Tommy would confuse the features and blow the sale over and over again.
Sometimes sales people hit slumps where it feels like you’re back in high school trying to ask a girl to the prom, and all you keep hearing is “no”. (Wait, that was just me??) Tommy was in a bad slump. Even worse, his entire company was depending on him to make his sales or else the company would get bought out. Your company may not be relying on your sales for its survival, but your job, and certainly your income may be relying on them. Being in a slump can be a scary and discouraging time; it can be hard to come into the office because you are so down on yourself.
But being in a slump isn’t an excuse to work less. It’s an opportunity to take a look at what you’ve been doing wrong and fix it once and for all. Tommy realized that he was not being himself; he was not having fun with what he was doing. When he fixed that, he hit the road again and started crushing it in sales. Your problem could be something else entirely (personally, when I cut out all the offensive profanity during my sales calls I saw HUGE improvements), and it will be well worth the time to discover what it is and change it.
And even though you may feel like you want to work less, it is very crucial to work harder than ever during this time. Start making more cold calls to fill the pipeline, write another blog or two on the weekends, get more involved on Twitter or LinkedIn Groups, do a webinar and promote it within your target market, call old clients to ask for referrals or testimonials, read some self-improvement or sales books, do role-play exercises with friends, family and co-workers. There are many things you can be doing to get yourself out of a slump, start doing them!
Anyone want to share a time when they were struggling and what good came from it?