Enthusiasm is infectious.

If you are enthusiastic about something, you are enjoying yourself, you have energy, you want to share, you want to give and have the other person feel and experience what you have for themselves.

You could say it’s altruistic. I don’t believe commission or your pay cheque make you genuinely enthusiastic – and that’s why enthusiasm is genuine and why prospects notice and trust enthusiastic people. And trust is the biggest asset of the sales person.
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I just got a great bit of direct mail. A standard letter in a window envelope landed in my in tray this morning. At first glance it looked like any other letter, but then I saw hand-written on the top right of the envelope “Ed, there’s a few ideas for shortening your sales cycle in here”.
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So why did your competitor win that work when you didn’t? There are often many potential rational reasons a prospect could give you – lower price, functionality differences, service, experience, etc. Sometimes though, if you question a prospect hard enough after a sales loss there seems to be little substance to their reasoning. They can’t back up their thinking or you just get the feeling that they’re plucking reasons out of thin air to get rid of you.
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