Here’s some­thing you may not know about me,  I used to be a vaca­tion club Sales Man­ager in Playa del Car­men, Mex­ico (don’t let any­one ever tell you a vaca­tion club isn’t timeshare).

I rose from Liner to Front-to-Back to Closer to Man­ager. Not to be a brag­gart, but for the sake of using my own story in this post, I was hot for a long time, a really long time. I was never less than a 20% Closer, but often 50%. I earned Top Sales Per­son of the Mex­i­can Caribbean after only 2 years sell­ing.. I earned more money in what was still at the time con­sid­ered to be a 3rd world coun­try than I ever have here in the US.

I learned more sell­ing time­share than I ever did in col­lege.. I learned how to read peo­ple, about emo­tional intel­li­gence, neuro lin­guis­tic pro­gram­ming, the art of nego­ti­a­tion, how tone and vol­ume of voice can influ­ence, body lan­guage, when to speak and when to be silent, the power of eye con­tact and a smile, how to push but­tons and yes, how to manip­u­late and get some­one to hand me their credit card. My clients spoke Eng­lish, Span­ish, Ital­ian, French… and other lan­guages too — but I didn’t need to speak much to sell, just a pen and paper and my brain. I even refused to sell to peo­ple if I found out they would have finan­cial hard­ship if they made a pur­chase — so I could sleep well at night.

The point is, no mat­ter how good I was, I wasn’t on any reg­u­lar basis a 100% Closer. I got turned down and rejected most often more times than not. Yet, I was very suc­cess­ful. I learned that every no was one step closer to a yes and vic­tory. Instead of pout­ing and lick­ing bat­tle wounds, suf­fer­ing from self-doubt, want­ing to give up for the day to go home curl up in a ball in bed, whin­ing and com­plain­ing to bring every­one else around me down,  I couldn’t wait for my next turn with a prospect.

Rejec­tion is a feel­ing no one is fond of but when dealt with in an effec­tive way it can bring us closer to other oppor­tu­nity.  ~ Karla

Com­mis­sioned sales is a tough gig, you don’t sell you don’t earn a sin­gle cen­tavo. You can go from zero to hero (the reverse is also true) in the time it takes to extract a credit card out of a wal­let. Watch­ing oth­ers sell around you in the sales room if you’re hav­ing a mala racha can get to you in a bad way if you don’t have the right per­spec­tive and atti­tude and pull you down… ruin your mojo and get you off your path. Peo­ple won’t want to be around you if you’re like that because neg­a­tiv­ity is con­ta­gious and they don’t want to be infected by you.

Giv­ing up is only an option if you don’t want to suc­ceed in what­ever your goal is (though you should know when to walk away from cer­tain things and life’s goals are malleable).

It should never be an option in a job search or quest for advance­ment within the com­pany you  work for.  Use the sales prin­ci­ple I talked about. If you apply for 9 jobs and then give up, it could have been the 10th that would have been the one you would have been offered. You’ll never know.……

A spe­cial thanks to @CarlissaT for the inspi­ra­tion for today’s post.