When Selling, You Gotta Believe in Yourself and Your Organization
At its very essence, selling is about the transfer of beliefs. Before your client decides to buy your product or service, your client buys your belief that you can solve their problems. Your customer will never believe in the value of your product or service any more strongly than you do. If you don’t believe in yourself, your organization or your organization’s ability to solve your client’s problems you might as well quit trying. Only con artists can intentionally sell something they don’t believe in.
When they first start, new business owners and salespeople are brimming with the belief that their new company and the products or services they sell are the best in the business. If we were to measure these beliefs on a scale from one to ten with ten meaning that they are the very best, early on, most salespeople and business owners would rank a 9 or a 10. But over time, stuff happens – orders get lost, products fail, and mistakes happen. Their belief in their company and its products or services begins to decline.
Over time, your competitors challenge your claims. Prospects who are loyal to your competition try to convince you that your products or services are no better than your competitors. Over time, you begin to buy into the belief that you’re merely average, no worse, but no better than your competition. You begin to see your products and services as nothing more than commodities. Your belief begins to backslide. As your belief drops from a 9 + down to a 5 or 6, your motivation to sell declines along with it.
If you are a business owner and you see this happening, you need to make some changes fast. Your first step is to assess your belief system and determine whether there is any truth to it. If there is, you need to find a way to differentiate your company from your competition so as to regain the belief that you and your company are superior to your competitors in the niche you serve.
If your assessment serves to remind you that you are, in fact, superior to your competition you need to look for ways to reinforce this positive, constructive, belief system every day. The training module on “Overcoming the Enemy Within” and the exercise on“Rewiring Your Belief System” will show you how.
If you are a salesperson whose beliefs begin to falter, you need to make the same assessments. In the end, you need to fix the problems within your company or fix your belief system. If you cannot do either, it’s time to look for a new job.
Research conducted by the late Bill Brooks of the Brooks Group shows that fear of rejection is not as big an issue for salespeople as fear of embarrassment. Salespeople must believe that the product or service they sell is exactly what they say it is and that it will perform exactly as they say it will. If they don’t believe it, they won’t say it for fear of being embarrassed in front of a customer or prospect. Let’s face it, if you can’t say it, you certainly can’t sell it.
Smart companies insure that the products or services they sell exceed the standards they promise to their customers. They spend a great deal of time proving, not to the customer, but to their salespeople, that the things they commit to are true — whether it’s the tolerance of a piece of heavy equipment, the terms of an extended warranty, the capacity of a digital product, or the reliability of a billing procedure. It makes no difference what it is. Salespeople must believe in the value and validity of what they sell. Once their belief is gone, their power to sell it goes with it.
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