How to Build your Sales Confidence
Many people hate to sell. You’ll often hear people say they can’t do marketing or sales jobs. This is quite sad because the truth is that each of us succeeds to the extent of our ability to sell.
Persuading our friends and families is a form of sales. Persuading our employers that we can do the best work is also another. Persuading customers that we have the best solutions to their problems and needs is Sales 101.
What really causes the fear of selling or the lack of confidence to sell? These are the questions we’ll attempt to address in this article.
The fear of selling is really the fear of rejection or criticism.
Many people feel tensed, bad, or insulted when a customer turns them down. The rejection affects their overall confidence and makes them react negatively to future events that require selling.
The Truth about Sales
Sales success is really about understanding Buyer Behaviour.
Customers need to trust and believe you and your product or service before they can give you their hard earned money.
You have to show confidence that your product can solve the customer’s problem or there will be no sales.
Customers need to test your confidence in yourself and the products you’re selling in order to build their trust and believe in your brand.
Don’t lose your confidence. Persist. The customer needs to trust and believe in order to buy. Lose your confidence, lose the sale.
You don’t like to convince the customer?
That easily translates to a lack of deep belief in the efficacy and value of your product/service.
If your product can change the customer’s life, you have to be confident and persistent in your communication.
3 ways to boost your Sales confidence
We gain confidence by suggestion and lose confidence by suggestion. According to Brain Tracy, there are 3 forms of suggestions that can determine how you feel about yourself and how you think.
- External Suggestion
- Self-Suggestion
- Auto Suggestion
1. External suggestion
These are all the things that go on around you from the moment you get up in the morning and until your last communication or information input before you sleep. Depending on how open and receptive you are, you can be influenced by:
- television, radio, newspapers, social media
- conversations, work experiences, feedback from superiors
- interaction with family and friends
- problems in traffic or change of weather
A great majority of people allow much of their lives to be determined by what goes on around them. They convince themselves that they are thinking independently, when instead, they’re only reacting to whatever happens. This explains why the negative emotions that upset and disturb you are usually unconscious, unthinking reactions that are triggered by external events.
We know this is true because no one will consciously and deliberately decide to feel negative and upset. When people are in control of their emotions, they choose to feel happy. For example, one of the most common expressions of negative emotions has to do with what is called ‘conditioned responses.’
These are automatic responses that we engage in when someone pushes one of our hot buttons. A hot button is a habitual negative way of reacting to an experience or to something that someone says. If you hate to be cut off in traffic and someone cuts you off, your hot button will be triggered and you’ll be talking angrily to yourself and anyone else who would listen for a long time until you calm down.
One of the ways to take control of your mind is to think through the various external factors that cause you to automatically become angry or upset. Make a list of everything that happens when you have the tendency to respond negatively. Then, consciously make the decision in the future when one of these issues comes up, you will instead respond calmly and not allow yourself to be upset and angry.
Smile. Take a deep breath. And remain calm.
The more you practice it, the easier it will become.
Your personality will become stronger and more resilient. Your self-confidence will go up and you’ll feel more in charge of your own life.
2. Self-suggestion
Self-suggestion is when you put both hands on the controls of your own mental computer and consciously program your sub-conscious mind with the thoughts and feelings that you desire.
Self-suggestion is your key to building the kind of belief system deep within yourself that will lead to unshakeable self-confidence.
The reason that self-suggestion works so well is because of the law of substitution. The law of substitution says that your conscious mind can hold one thought at a time, positive or negative.
If you consciously choose to hold a positive word or picture in your mind, you simultaneously block out various input from external sources that might cause your thinking and feeling to be negative or inconsistent with your desires.
For example, if whenever you begin to feel tense, uneasy or angry about something, you switch your mind and start thinking of your major goals. Your mind will go from negative to positive instantly and you feel good about yourself again.
A thought of a goal which is positive and future-oriented is inherently uplifting. You cannot think of your goal and be angry or upset at the same time. By using the law of substitution you take full control over your suggestive environment and over the information that reaches your subconscious mind
Here’s an affirmation that can be very helpful to you in any negative situation. If something goes wrong, immediately catch yourself by saying “every situation is a positive situation if viewed as an opportunity for growth and self-mastery.”
This is a simple mind game that will enable you to stay relaxed and continue to perform at your best. Just give it a try.
3. Auto Suggestion
This happens when you repeat a message to your sub-conscious mind so often that they take on a power of their own and function automatically.
We have found continually that happy optimistic people have programmed themselves to respond in a happy and optimistic way to almost every situation. And you can do the same thing.
Conclusion
In summary, we gain confidence by suggestion and lose confidence by suggestion. All of life is bound up and determined by your responses. It’s not what happens to you but how you react to what happens to you that counts.
In other words, life and sales is like a game of cards (shot). It’s not the cards that you’re dealt but the way you play the cards that determines how well you do in the game of life.
Your job is to consciously decide to use your will power to keep your mind clear and to keep yourself positive and functioning at your best.
