Episode #315: Four Strategies For Building Confidence In Sales

Buyers can smell fear and desperation on salespeople. When the sales funnel is sad and prospects are few, we panic. The client picks up on this and unconsciously they hesitate to work with us, because for them something doesn't feel right. We are suffering. We are reminded of the Sales Manager’s mantra, “don’t tell me about what you have sold in the past, tell me what deals you are doing today”. Sales is a moving feast where we have to constantly recreate our results every week and the boss pressure to perform is unrelenting. In these circumstances our confidence can take a battering and we are pushed over the edge into a savage downward spiral, rocketing toward sales oblivion. Here are four strategies to boost our self-confidence to get back on the bucking bronco that is the sales life.

1. Self-Acceptance

We need to stop beating ourselves up when sales are not going well – that is the Sale’s Manager’s joy. We have to realise we cannot control currency rates, market movements, interest rates, wars, supply chain fiascos, pandemics, etc. We need to look at what we can control. In fact, we have perfect control over the most powerful weapon in sales – our time and how we use it. Once we make that decision to exercise control over what we do every minute of the day, we can start moving our mindset from one of deal poverty, to one of deal abundance.

We know what we need to be doing, but are we actually spending our days doing that? If we don’t have clients we need to get busy contacting previous clients where the trail has gone cold and find new clients. Remote working styes has created new barriers to contacting buyers and so we need to adjust what we were doing, to what we need to be doing now. We need to be searching for potential contacts through data banks, LinkedIn, our contacts in the market, the media - anywhere we can locate a name and then we need to call that person. Yes, we will run into blockers who answer the phone, but we need to leave messages, send items using mail which don’t look like spam and even turn up there to meet the buyer. We know our buyer avatar, their profile and so we can target new buyers who are similar and then make a concerted effort to meet them.

2. Self-Respect

We have had deal successes, we have served clients extremely well and so we know we can do this. Our confidence takes a hammering though when things are not moving forward and in the process, we can forget our track record and all of the things we have learnt along the way. We need to dig into our past successes for reminders of what we did to be successful. The sales process is made of microscopic elements and it is a game of millimetres in terms of driving sales forward.

By focusing on those building blocks, we can make sure we are not cutting corners and are completing the right steps to get to a sales. Did we actually follow-up with that client? Was the follow-up fast enough, comprehensive enough, exciting enough, attractive enough? Let’s break down the steps and remind ourselves of what we were doing when we were harvesting deals and being successful, making good commissions and gaining confidence in ourselves. Go back and analyse what made you a deal maker. You have done it before and you can do it again.

3. Take Risks

Certainly push the envelope, but not with your reputation. Taking risks with your reputation is a one way ticket out of the sales profession. I am not talking about that. I am thinking about challenging new ways of doing things and tackling new ways of analysing where the business might be had. We tend to get into ruts and we get stuck in our thinking. We need to do a reboot of our perspectives about where the business might be gained.

We might need to re-allocate our time and try something new. Maybe we haven’t been doing enough research on the industry or the market and so our sales call conversation is not getting us anywhere. Time management is full of risks, if you get it wrong and aren’t working on the right things. I mentioned before about dusting off some tobikomi eigyo (door to door) sales techniques, which because of the time involved could be considered a risky use of our time, but maybe it is worth giving it a crack and just see what happens. Your competitors certainly won’t be rolling up unannounced to the client’s office looking for the buyer.

4. Self-Talk

Salespeople are often terrible self-talkers. We get down on ourselves when things are not going well and our self-talk turns toxic. This confidence death spiral must be avoided at all costs. Once your self-talk talks you out of your ability to succeed in sales, you are done. Sales is hard enough when things are going okay, let alone when times are rough and tough.

We need to change our diet of what we put into our minds. We need to ramp up the motivational material, the self-belief gurus, the whole gamut of positive mind control. We must switch the words which come into our minds for the negative to the positive. When we notice a nasty negative descriptor suddenly appearing, we have to smash it to pieces and replace it with a positive word. We need to do that immediately and every time.

These four tools can help us reconstruct our self-confidence and change our fortunes. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is right now.