When business goes bad

The following is based on one of The Covenant Group’s clients. All of the names and telling details have been changed.

I’d known Doug Grebeck long before he got into trouble. We met when I was doing some work with a local financial services company. Doug’s manager, Sebastian, had selected twenty of his top people to go through a course I was running. At the time Doug was one of the bright lights at the office. 

I got to know Doug fairly well when we started doing some one-on-one coaching. It was his sixth year in the business. Typically, he’d had a slow start - spent the first couple of years laying the foundation for his growth years, and had the good fortune to land a series of large cases that established him in the high-net-worth market. For the last four years, he’d been doing really well and growing. I found him an intelligent, warm-hearted person with an off-beat sense of humour. What I didn’t know then, was that Doug’s upbeat personality was his reaction to success. I didn’t know that his personality would change when his business did.

About a month ago I was surprised to get a call from Sebastian. I hadn’t seen him or Doug for over a year. Sebastian told me he was calling because of Doug. He was worried about his advisor and wanted to book some of my time so I could consult with him. When I eventually did meet with Doug, I must admit, I was startled by the change he had undergone. In fact, I thought I was meeting a different person. He looked old. He’d gained weight and was wearing an old suit. The biggest shock came when we started talking. His once enthusiastic attitude had done a complete 180. Now he seemed depressed and fatalistic.

When I first started working with Doug his sales performance had been so strong he’d won the office sales competition. Sebastian had given him an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii with his wife, Estelle. At that time they’d been married 18 years and he was madly in love with her. He also had a great relationship with Sebastian and his future seemed bright.

But about a year ago he had hit a bad patch. When I asked him what happened, he told me that it all started when a large deal he was working on, fell through. Unfortunately, that setback was followed by the loss of two other promising cases, that other advisors won away from him. Things had begun to look grim. He’d spent years working hard to get to the level he was at, and he wasn’t really prepared to handle the tough times when they hit. He took it pretty badly. His mood changed. He lost confidence in his abilities, started to believe he didn’t deserve to win new accounts. He stopped getting haircuts and began gaining weight. Estelle began to suffer because of his situation and his attitude. His sour demeanor made him harder to get along with around the office. 

It was clear to me that he was hurting himself. I told him that he wasn’t giving himself a chance to win new accounts anymore. His un-shined shoes and outgrown hair did little to instil confidence. 

He just grimaced and said, “I’ll buy a new suit when I close a deal.”

He was really far gone. He needed to snap out of his funk before he rock bottom. “No,” I said. “You should buy a new suit now - so that you can close the deal.”

I asked him to tell me about the cases he was working on at the moment. He mentioned an opportunity he had to meet with Mr. Swanson who owned a chain of family restaurants. The most telling thing about our discussion about Mr. Swanson, was Doug’s attitude. He figured it probably wasn’t worth his time. He guessed that he’d work hard at it and wouldn’t end up closing the deal. He was fairly confident he wouldn’t be able to convince Mr. Swanson to work with him. 

I asked Doug when he was meeting Mr. Swanson and he told me he had booked an appointment in three weeks time. We obviously had a lot of work to do, so we scheduled a number of meetings to try and address Doug’s problem.

I’m not a psychologist. It’s not my role to address any deeper issues Doug may have had. But, from a business point of view, I knew it was important for Doug to concentrate on how he presented himself to his client, and that’s what we worked on over the next three weeks. In particular, we focused on his general attitude, appearance, mannerisms and way of interacting. In fact, Doug and I acted out role-plays, where I played Mr. Swanson. As well, we even reversed the roles, so Doug could gain a perspective on how he would be perceived by Swanson. Doing this hit home with Doug the power of effective presentation. 

Two days after our final preparation meeting I got a call from Doug. He was thrilled. He had just received a signature from Mr. Swanson. The deal was closed. Doug was laughing and animated again. He couldn’t stop talking about ideas he had and prospects he could contact. The old Doug was back.

Today Doug is successful - even more so than when I first met him. And, I’m happy to say, Estelle and his coworkers have re-discovered how much fun he can be.

Lessons Learned

Confidence is not a reflection of your external circumstances, it has to come from within. If you let your external circumstances dictate how you feel or how you see yourself, you’ll never be in control of your career or your life. One thing I stressed to Doug was that he was still the same person that was able to sell so well during those first few years. Just because he hadn’t closed for a while, didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of making sales again. He just had to believe in himself. If he felt he couldn’t close a deal and wasn’t worthy of it, so would his clients. That was why he continued to do badly.

Your prospects and clients are very perceptive and sensitive to how you feel about yourself. If they sense a lack of confidence on your part, however slight that might be, they will not do business with you.

The high-performing advisors I know all go through rough spells. Especially because they work on such large and complicated cases. They can sometimes go weeks without closing anything. But no one around them would know that - especially not their prospects or clients. They persistently project an image of success and confidence that will win out in the end. 

One client of mine went through a very bad time a couple of years ago. He was a big name in the business, but he was close to going bankrupt. Yet every time I saw him he was immaculately dressed, was quick with a smile and a confident handshake. He was full of optimism about pending deals. And, eventually, things did turn around for him. But had he reflected his current state in his outward appearance and attitude, he would not have been able to turn his business around. 

As a final note, we saw with Doug and Estelle, that when business goes bad, it can put pressure on your relationships. Doug’s negative attitude pushed Estelle and his co-workers away. Luckily, a lot of the work we do professionally can also benefit us personally. When Doug was able to raise his professional confidence, it greatly relieved the pressure on his relationships.

Maintaining a positive self-image and projecting that image confidently to those around is the key to overcoming the rough times we all must face.

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The Covenant Group is referred to by many as the place entrepreneurs go to become Business Builders. They are considered to be thought leaders and have authored the best-selling books, The 8 Best Practices of High-Performing Salespeople, The Entrepreneurial Journey, and The Business Builder.