Resilience is defined as the ability to adapt positively to adverse situations.
A resilient SDR can quickly recover from the rejections of the leads (which won’t be few!), analysing and learning from the situation to reemerge more strongly towards the next lead to prospect.
How can I work on my resilience?
Fall in love with your “failures” and bring out the best in them
A first step would be to fully accept that there are going to be times when you fail.
Even if you’ve prepared the call thoroughly and studied your lead’s recent LinkedIn activity to be relevant, you’re not always going to win and get a meeting. There are external factors beyond your control. Focus on what you can learn from the feedback and think about what actions to take to improve the process.
Remember your strengths
When you fail to prospect a lead, it’s easy to lose motivation or enthusiasm. In these moments, remembering what you’re really good at can help you regain confidence in yourself and give you a sense of direction. This will contribute, at the same time, to analyse the situation with more clarity and focus to draw conclusions from it.
Never stop learning
Moreover, having a growth mindset is also essential. That is, trusting that your skills and talent can always keep improving and are not fixed.
You will know that you have such mindset if you’re not afraid of effort or challenges, you see mistakes as a way of learning, and you’re open to advice and constructive criticism.
Read
It can also be very beneficial to read articles and books about resilience, especially in the context of sales.
Following successful profiles involved with sales in your industry who share content can help you reflect on what you already know and add interesting ideas or tips that will propel you forward.
Create a supportive community
It’s super important to build up a collaborative community.
It’s very interesting to see how your resilience is influenced both by your personal characteristics and those from your community.
If your team is fragile and doesn’t have a growth mindset, it’s probable that you’ll absorb some of this energy, so you must be fully involved in strengthening the people around you.
The bottom line
There are many techniques you can follow to build your resilience.
It is a good idea to try and find the one that works best for you. Your success as an SDR will be closely related to how quickly you lift yourself out of obstacles and what you learn from them, so you should never stop working on this skill!
Find out how working in sales can be a masked opportunity to improve your soft skills.
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