Just imagine for a moment that you have perfect sales skills. You know everything there is to know about selling and you know what to do in every sales situation. Now just suppose there is another person selling the identical products and services as you and they too have perfect sales skills.
Who is going to be more successful at selling? The person who is going to be more successful is the one who 'thinks' they can. Let me explain this further.
What sets the boundaries of your sales success is you, your thoughts and your beliefs. You can never sell more than the limits/boundaries you have set for yourself. You have thoughts and beliefs about the type and size of the sales you are capabable/deserving of and the amount of sales income you can earn.
So if you think and believe you are capable of earning $100,000 a year, your autopilot system will go into action to make sure you earn that $100,000. If you think you are a $500,000 a year salesperson, your autopilot system will go into action to make sure you take the actions to earn that $500,000. Yes, you may occasionally exceed what you think you are capable of but rest assured your subconscious will go to work to average it all out to what you think you can.
Your thoughts and beliefs are not the truth but you have made them your truth - probably subconsciously - and you will always be loyal to and live up to your truth automatically. All your actions will always be in alignment with making your truth a reality - whether you like it or not. So can you see now that your success at selling is not just about your sales skills?
Your sales success = your sales skills + your thoughts/beliefs.
It is interesting, don't you think, that most sales training simply focuses on teaching you HOW to sell and how to perfect your sales skills? The false assumption is that to improve your sales success you only need to focus on improving your sales skills. This is only part of the equation.
With respect to selling, there are specific thoughts and beliefs that have a significant impact on your sales success. These are your thoughts and beliefs around: what selling is, who you need to 'be' to sell and how successful you think you can be. Your thoughts and beliefs in these areas act as throttles holding you back and there are fairly simple techniques to take these throttles off.
Imagine you have a belief that selling is about convincing/persuading/manipulating someone to buy something they may or may not want. How does that make you feel? Uncomfortable? Resistant to having sales conversations?
Now change that perspective to one where you view selling as having conversations to see if you can help people get what they want. How does this perspective make you feel? Comfortable? More relaxed about having sales conversations?
Where there is resistance there is a throttle. Throttles regulate flow and with respect to selling they regulate the flow/limit of your sales success. With this example, by changing your perspective on what selling is you have effectively released this throttle (resistance) so your sales conversations can now flow more readily. I hope you are getting the concept.
Go in search of all your beliefs and thoughts around sales and look for thoughts and beliefs that cause resistance as you will then have found throttles which are limiting your sales success. Work on releasing these throttles so your sales conversations flow.
At the beginning I said that you unconsciously and automatically live up to the boundaries/limits you have set for yourself with respect to your sales success. Hence it is logical then that the higher the boundaries/limits you have set for yourself, the higher your sales results will be automatically. So if you can remove any throttles you may have around selling, you will automatically raise the boundaries/limits you have set for yourself and you will automatically sell more. It will be automatic. How easy is that?
So forget about trying harder and working harder. Focus instead on lifting your boundaries/limits and watch the quantum leap in your sales happen automatically.
You can really think and grow sales!
(c) 2007, Tessa Stowe, Sales Conversation. WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR E-ZINE OR WEBSITE? Yes, you can, provided you make all links live and include this copyright and by-line below.
Tessa Stowe teaches small business owners and recovering salespeople 10 simple steps to turn conversations into clients without being sales-y or pushy. Sign-up for her FREE monthly newsletter that is full of tips on how to sell your services by just being yourself at http://www.salesconversation.com
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