Every sales professional's efforts benefit when they are assertive in appropriate circumstances.
Here are three tips to help make you a more assertive salesperson:

1. Improve your presentation by making it more compelling
If you can get your prospective customers interested in your product or service offering, often a more assertive approach becomes unnecessary.
Asking the customer well thought-out questions about their likely needs, goals, or other desires they wish to accomplish can also take the focus off of you, making a contest of wills with customers something which can be avoided entirely.
To improve your presentation, you should always perform proper pre-call planning, and take notes after each sales call if there are elements which you want to improve in future sales calls.
This will ensure that your sales presentations become consistently better, as you gain more experience.

2. Put your bad sales calls behind you
Every sales professional will have at least some bad sales calls, and it is important to have a very short memory when it comes to these.
You might reward yourself for making a certain number of sales presentations, or have another member of your sales team do so.
You might also benefit from remembering past positive events, such as sales calls which went particularly well, to reinvigorate your sales efforts after those calls which did not go as planned.
Negative goals, such as challenging other salespeople to be the first to get to 1,000 "No's," may also increase the successes you experience along the way as well.
The only danger with this tactic is if you miss out on viable sales opportunities, which can be avoided if you have a checklist to ensure that you detect all possible opportunity points within the sale.

3. Realize that some situations call for not being as assertive
Sometimes, your potential customers are simply having a bad day.
People are emotional beings, and their poor response may have nothing to do with you, your presentation, or confidence level.
The best way to realize this comes with practice, and asking yourself: "How should a typical customer be responding to me?" If your prospective customer's behavior is significantly different from how a normal customer should respond, then it is probably not you-- it is them, and whatever other issues they had to deal with earlier.
In these cases, your best bet may be to retreat temporarily, and try calling at another time when the customer has had a chance to change their mood for the better.

In short, when you make your sales presentation interesting, forget about poor sales calls, and recognize when being assertive actually works against you, it is possible to use assertiveness wisely to improve your sales presentations.
Copyright 2010, by Marc Mays