It is intuitively obvious that there is a difference between knowing what needs to be done or said and what a person can actually execute under the pressure of a sales call. Any sales manager has experienced the maddening effect of salespeople who “know better” continually fail at certain aspects of the sales process. The reason this occurs is that knowing what to say is an intellectual exercise, but execution involves emotions or what we call self-limiting beliefs. The easy example is discussing money. A salesperson may “know” that it is important to talk about the budget on a sales call and will do so flawlessly in a role-play situation. However, if he believes that it is impolite to talk about money and he further believes that the prospect won’t tell him what he wants to spend, then he will be ineffective in the field around the discovering budget. To be an effective sales manager you must know what self-limiting beliefs your salespeople possess.
