B2B Business Tips: Ups and Downs

If you're looking for major new business, I suggest you take three hours off a week, doing something else in the business other than sales calls. Reward yourself by doing something that you normally would not have had the luxury of doing while you were on the road. It could be volunteering at your children's school, meeting a professional business person for breakfast or lunch, etc.

Allow yourself an hour to walk outside the office or work out of your house for a change. Another idea is to engage in some type of physical activity, such as a maintenance project. (Don't forget that this period of instability is a particularly hard time for the other corporate business employees as well.) Try to find some project you can easily control, complete, and witness visual results from, while helping out at the office.

The physical labor and visual results helped you refocus and get re-energized.

Some of the typical types of emotions you might experience or go through during a down turn in your business are the following:

· Shock
· Denial
· Betrayal
· Anger
· Isolation
· Sadness
· Depression
· Shame
· Fear
Relative to the situation, fear, to me, can be the most paralyzing and insidious of all these emotions. You need to manage any fear you have or it will manage you and try to destroy your spirit. One of the ways to manage your fear is to push through it by being grateful for what you have. When you practice gratitude, you dissipate and weaken the fear. You are then in control of the fear instead of the other way around.

One of the most important techniques for boosting happiness revolves around the psychology of gratitude. Psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough performed a study with three groups of people to test this theory. One group wrote about five things that annoyed them, another group wrote about five things that took place the previous week, and the third group wrote about the five things they were grateful for each week. The last group, the ones who wrote about what they were grateful for, were, in the end, happier, much more optimistic about the future, and physically healthier. They even exercised more.

I am now going to suggest my own personal spin on this method, which is to name five things, first thing in the morning before you get out of bed, that you are grateful for. Repeat this process right before you go to bed, naming five things you were grateful for during that day.

If you have the time, write these gratitude items down on the front of a 3 x 5 inch card each morning and on the back of the card at end of each day. If you do so, it will really strengthen the process for you. I'm a firm believer that writing something down and verbalizing it is stronger than just thinking about it.

Another somewhat-related trick is to replay the day's events in your head. If something did not go the way you wanted it to, replay the event in your mind. As you do so, rewrite the story to reflect a positive turn of events. Do this right before you go to sleep. It's always better to go to bed with positive thoughts lingering as opposed to negative ones. To overcome them, you must keep pushing the negative thoughts back.

I know everyone is telling you that what you're currently going through is for the best, and there is a reason behind your new business challenges.

In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill said, "Every negative event contains within it the seed of an equal or greater benefit." I believe that with all my heart, even if we may not know what that reason is right now.

Another way to look at it would be from Mary Kay Ash's viewpoint: "For every failure, there's an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour."

When you start feeling down, remember that the "no" you just got from one company or decision maker puts you that much closer to the "yes" and the next great client you have been waiting for you.

Stay committed to being in control as you manage the ups and downs you will be experiencing while you work on landing that next BIG client.

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Small Business Sales Tips
Eleanor Anne Sweet

Chief Results Officer

President/CEO B2B TURBOCHARGED Sales,

Division of The Remington Group, LLC

Email: sweet@turbochargedsales.com