Episode #363 Self-Belief In Sales

Imposter syndrome is a fact of this sale’s life. If we try to avoid that and strive for safety by staying in our lane and just repeat the same actions, we will probably master what we need to do to complete the job. The problem is organisations keep moving the goalposts every year and they want higher revenue productivity. The market also moves on us too and we cannot control that. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things over and over again, in the same way, but expecting an improved result. When things don’t go as well as we need, we feel like imposters. Maybe that previous good result, that big deal was just a fluke, a bit of luck, rather than ability.

Having clients tell you they have gone with another provider really hurts. Getting them to tell you why is difficult. They don’t want to get into an argument, so they try and ghost you and give you no answer. When you persist with your follow-up, they send you some bromide message that doesn’t tell you anything. If you try to ferret out what they paid to your competitor, they just ignore you.

Losing deals sparks self-doubt. Am I not good enough? Are we way out of line with the market on our pricing? What if this snowballs or continues for lengthy periods? Where did I go wrong? Where was the breakdown point in my explanation of the benefits? What do I need to change? What information did I fail to supply to my champion with, to get a “yes” answer pushed through the organisation decision-making machine? Salespeople are always under pressure to perform, so none of this is helping our mental outlook. It is such a fragile self-belief system in sales, so it is so easy to spiral downwards into oblivion and ultimately, ejection from the company and possibly from the profession of sales itself.

What do we need to do? Pricing is always the elephant in the room for salespeople. “If we were cheaper, I could make more sales”, is the logic. That is true, but what does your brand stand for and what is your positioning in the market? How does getting in less money per deal get you to your revenue target? Price is not the main thing for a lot of successful sales. The buyer has to weight up price against value. A cheap but inferior solution can cost a lot of time and disruption, so it effectively becomes an expensive proposition.

Many years ago, I was on a temporary assignment in Australia. I bought a cheap blender from a retailer down there. The rubber seal ring was a problem and after a while what was being blended would go everywhere. I replaced that blender three times before I gave up and dispensed with the whole idea. The price was cheap, but the irritation and time loss traipsing back and forth to the store, was enormous.

I should have spent more money and ensured a better quality outcome. That is the message we need to get across to the buyer about our product or service here in Japan, to overcome price sensitivity. I have had a couple of potential sales fall over on price lately. This is excruciating, because I thought I had built good rapport with the buyer. The issue today though is there are more and more people coming into the circle of decision-making and your buyer has to navigate the sale through the turbulent waters of their organisation on your behalf. If they hit an internal reef and capsize, your deal drowns. I now reflect on did I do a good enough job providing the bullets for my champion to fire to get the deal done? Did I explain the value equation well enough? What was missing in that presentation of mine?

When deals fall over in sales, our self-doubt bubbles to the surface. Have I lost my mojo? Am I no longer able to persuade buyers to pay what we need for our solution? We cannot stop the process of these self-doubts arising, but we have to keep moving forward, regardless. The answer to deal loss is to have more irons in the fire, on the mathematical basis, that more deals come from having more conversations. If there is a deal flow issue, then we have to get busier talking to more buyers. We increase the chance of doing a deal in this situation.

Talking to more buyers needs more activity to generate those conversations. We have our pool of previous clients who are not active at the moment. They are a good place to start because they will at least know of us. We need to go back to our existing clients and see if we can cross sell them or upsell them. The client is never on our timetable, so we have to keep making the effort to get in touch regardless of how busy we become current servicing clients agreeing to deals. If we don’t, we run out of deals and then we have nothing – the Death Valley of Sales. Once we have exhausted all possible leads, we have to rev the whole process up again and that takes considerable time.

There are no free lunches or givens in this sales life. We recreate our realities every single day. No matter how hard we get bucked off the rodeo bull, we have to climb back up into the saddle and try again. If we can’t do that, then sales as an industry, has no place for us and we better try another occupation.