How quickly do your salespeople bounce back? How vulnerable are they to a prospect's supportive, then suddenly non-supportive, words and actions? Can they separate "themselves" from day-to-day events?

Salespeople and sales managers must be resilient. Insuring they have and develop the tenacity, grit, motivation and capacity to recover from rejection is part of building a vibrant sales culture.

Real time coaching - mainly pre-call strategy and post-call debriefing - will help. By resetting a salesperson's call objectives and expectations, you prepare them for the prospects pushback and lessen the impact of being surprised. When you break down a call and show the salesperson what led them to the outcome they reached and how they could have achieved a better outcome you help them prepare for the next prospect interaction.

Be relentless with your encouragement and offer to help but allow them to make mistakes. Resilience comes from "living to fight another day" and recognizing through this that sales is full of ups and downs, left turns and right turns, happy and grumpy prospects and that they can avoid being sidelined by this emotional rollercoaster.

Creating a resilient sales culture requires that you acknowledge the frustration, discouragement and anxiety your people face each day and allow them to voice it. Too often we expect them to be tough and "just deal with it". While ultimately true, our marching orders are frequently conveyed in a way that sounds like this.

I'm not suggesting you conduct therapy, but helping a salesperson get past an unnecessary worry requires honesty. Resilience requires flexibility, in this case flexibility by you the CEO and your sales managers to invest the time your salespeople need from you.