Archives for February 2018

Changing a belief is a hard thing to do. After all you didn’t decide to have the belief you have, you came to it gradually through training, education, parental programming, societal norms, etc. I have written many times about the dramatic effects that changing a self-limiting belief can have on your sales career. Here is some practical advice on how to actually go about changing a belief that is getting in your way. All you have to do is pretend you have the empowering belief instead of the self-limiting one. For example, if you believe that you can’t get to the CEO on a sales call and you have to go through purchasing to get an order, then all you have to do to begin the process of changing that belief is to pretend to have the opposite belief. That belief might be that “my product solves a problem only the president can appreciate”. Or maybe the empowering belief is “people like me should be talking to the president”. Once you adopt the mindset (even if only temporarily) that you should be talking to the president, then say to yourself “if I had this belief what would I do” or “what would I say” or, “How would I act”. Then go and do that while trying to maintain the proper belief or mindset. I Grant that you will be outside your comfort zone, but doing the same things over and over will not get you a different result. And if you do bypass purchasing and get in front of the president, you will have a new experience, you will learn something new (probably that it wasn’t as scary as you thought), and you will have something to build on. At first you will most likely fail. But didn’t you fail the first time you made a sales call? Didn’t it get better as time went on and you got more experience? Didn’t the same thing happen when you were learning to walk? You probably fell at least 100 times before you could successfully walk across the room without help. That didn’t stop you from learning to walk. So why are you afraid to fail now? Pretend to have the empowering belief, then ask yourself “what would I do if I had that belief”, then go do that.

Changing a self-limiting belief to a belief that is empowering is sometimes a long process. An easy first step is to act as if you had the empowering belief even before you have it. It involves a little play acting but the effects can be literally life changing. If you believe that people will not reject you ask yourself what would I say or do if I believed that they would not reject me … then do that and act as if you had the more empowering belief that they would not reject you out of hand. If you believe that they will not tell you how much they want to spend ask yourself “what would I say and how would I say it if I believed that they would actually tell me”. Then do or say that.
The hard part is knowing what the empowering belief is. It is usually the opposite of what you believe. If you are not sure then find a successful person in your field and ask them what their belief is. Or just imagine what they might say or do and then say or do that. At first it will not work as well for you as it does for them. But adopting their belief and changing how you approach a tough selling situation will get you different results and begin the process of changing your self-limiting belief.

You set up a meeting with a high level prospect which took weeks to make happen. She is a decision maker with a problem in a company which is your ideal prospect. If you are like the typical salesperson (remember 76% of salespeople are ineffective) You will take the following actions:
• Invite your boss or a technical person to come with you
• Prepare 20 PowerPoint slides to impress the prospect with
• Check out the prospects website and linkedin profile

If you are the optimal salesperson you will do the following:
• Do some research on the prospect and her problem
• Talk to your tech team and/or boss to bone up on questions you should ask
• Go on the call prepared and alone
The optimal salesperson realizes that in a preliminary meeting the primary objective is to establish a relationship, uncover the essence of the problem and the pain that the prospect is experiencing, see how much money they are willing to commit to the project and then give a summary of how your people would approach the problem or have approached similar problems in the past. The final step would be to move the project forward by setting up follow-on meetings before you leave the first meeting. The optimal salesperson further realizes that the prospect is more likely to open up with only two in the meeting and bringing the boss to an initial meeting devalues the boss and will cause the salesperson to lose control of the meeting. As a general rule take as few people to a sales call as you can get away with. The meetings will be easier to control and have a better outcome.

You work hard. You don’t waste time. You have good sales skills you hit your number this year after 3 years of falling short. But, you need to get to the next level to hit your financial goals. So what can you do? Your sales need to increase by 40%. Can you find another 20 hours in the work week? The answer is probably not! Can you increase your closing percentage by 40 percent? Again the answer is probably not. So it is obvious that what got you here may not get you where you want to go. So what can you do?

The answer is that you need to do something different. Call on bigger accounts. Spend more time working on getting introductions to senior executives. Change your belief in what you can accomplish? In short, you must make some major change because just doing more of the same is not an option. The very first step is to raise your expectation and belief about what is possible. As Napoleon Hill said a generation or 2 ago “whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve”. As you prepare to do business in the time after the pandemic this sales tip is even more applicable. You may have to change your mindset to be successful.