Prepare Your Mindset Before The Sales Call

Beliefs are more important to sales success than sales techniques or sales processes. Everyone knows that if you don’t believe in your product you will not be very effective at selling it. Not everyone knows why that is true. Part of it has to do with the fact that you will not be willing to stretch the truth by saying something is good if you don’t think that it is. But it is more important to understand how beliefs affect everything you say and how believable or effective your words are. It well established that we communicate more by our tonality and body language than we do by the actual words we say. One study showed that as much as 93 percent of communication is non-verbal. If you think about it we all learned to communicate non-verbally first because we did not know any words until we were about 18 months old.

What we believe will be communicated non-verbally whether we want to communicate it or not. For example, many salespeople believe that a client will not be willing to give them a referral. Suppose we train that salesperson to ask for referrals by teaching them what to say and how to say it. But, we do not address the belief that he has. When he goes to a meeting with a client and asks for a referral in exactly the way he was taught, the chances are that the salesperson will return home empty handed. The reason is that when he asked for the referral 7% of what he communicated was “please give me a referral” (more or less). However 93% was screaming out at the prospect (through his tonality and body language) “there is no way you are going to give me a referral”. His belief was not congruent with his words.

Before you go on a call you must get your mindset straight. If you are going to ask tough questions make sure you believe you have the right to know the answers or else the prospect will either refuse to answer or dodge you by dancing around the subject. If you are not sure your product is the right fit or is worth the money, then work on selling yourself first so that your beliefs can match your words. If you don’t, your tonality will try to “un-convince the prospect” in very subtle almost undetectable ways. If you have ever had someone from your company come in behind you and close a deal you failed to close and said to yourself “but how come he didn’t buy when I said that?”, now you know the reason. Before you go on a call make sure your mindset is congruent with what you are planning to do on the call. Click this link to watch a short video for more explanation.