Only by setting long-term career goals can salespeople, account managers and commercial leaders excel. Resilience, then, is the ability to deal creatively with the challenges and setbacks that come with pursuing these goals.
Resiliency allows a salesperson, account manager and commercial leader to face new commercial challenges more effectively. Successful salespeople, account managers and commercial leaders become battle hardened when they overcome challenges incrementally and thereby generate more sales. This is also called small wins that then generate feelings of happiness and self-assurance.
Want to know more about how we interpret happiness?
Resilient leaders craft their own brand. Brands have a placebo effect on customers: specifically, the commercial leader obtains a reputation for being a creative problem solver, and customers thus expect the commercial leader to be able to recognize and solve their problems.
However, resilience can ONLY be developed by actually experiencing adversity or challenges, no pain no gain! Salespeople, account managers and commercial leaders must, among other things, deal with customer rejections, they must dare to acquire or set up challenging projects at key accounts.
Resilience consists of both reversing thought and feeling processes and making new connections in the brain. This is known as: use it or lose it. Successful salespeople, account managers and commercial leaders therefore seek out strategic accounts where they seek to solve their problems, because these projects are more challenging they can ultimately learn more from them. Applying this acquired expertise to other clients or projects is called knowledge brokering.
Commercial leadership, setting career goals, developing resilience, knowledge brokering and developing your own brand with placebo effects on clients are the core concepts of the ExploreMe Mindset.
Mindset here means that we provide you with frameworks which are based on years of scientific research, so that you think about yourself as a salesperson, account manager or commercial leader in new ways and that consequently inspires and motivates you to develop specific commercial skills so that you generate more sales by your customers and accounts.
Willem Verbeke is co-founder and co-owner of Professional Capital. He developed the ExploreMe.eu model that guides coaching and training of Professionals. As a trainer, Verbeke led more than 7,000 professionals in marketing and sales. He is co-founder of the SalesMBAin1Day.
Willem Verbeke studied philosophy at the University of Ghent and majored in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He received his doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Since 1986 he was associated with the Erasmus School of Economics, Rotterdam and became Distinguished Professor in Sales and Account Management from 1999 to 2020.
From 2020 to 2024, he was professor emeritus at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Verbeke also took courses at Harvard University, Erasmus MC, Case Western Reserve University and University of California at Irvine. Furthermore, he ran the Rotterdam Marathon 9 times.
