Business
owners continue to astound me with their enthusiasm for their business. They
are massively passionate about what they do and they work mighty hard to build
or maintain their business. Whether it’s a brilliant new concept, or they’ve
bought a franchise, or inherited the family firm, generally they love it and
throw themselves into it.
Apart from
one bit.
The selling
bit! What is it about selling?
Many businesses
owners and entrepreneurs have the most wonderful 3 year business plans. I’ve
been shown some superb brochures. I’ve witnessed some incredible inventions.
But their businesses are reaching nowhere near their potential – because of a
reluctance to go out and sell.
The result
being I’ve also seen the tidiest desks. And lots of social media activity. And
some of the most thorough research on the planet.
But if
you’re a business owner you have to master the necessary selling skills – or
you won’t be owning a business for all that long. And if you’re responsible for
increasing sales at a larger company, you have to sell too, or you’ll soon be
selling yourself to an HR manager at a future job interview.
Many sell but
their heart is not really in it. And how will this come across to the buyers
they deal with? We all know any lack of enthusiasm for selling will show.
Why do
people dislike selling? Why the reluctance to approach and engage?
Let me
explain that there are two main underlying reasons why people don’t achieve the
sales results they need.
Firstly -
they are living in “The Valley of Reasons and Excuses”. That means blaming
something or someone else for where they find themselves. Not taking
responsibility. It’s the economy, nobody is spending etc etc etc. This is a
massive subject in its own right but one for another day – as the thing I want
to home in on today is the other reason people don’t sell well...
Secondly...what
you believe about yourself – and your ability to sell, will severely impact on
your results.
So what do
you believe about your selling ability? What do you believe about yourself?
What ‘sales’ language are you using to yourself? What do you believe about the
sales profession?
If you’re a
reluctant seller the odds are that you’ll display negative language when
thinking or talking about your sales ability or the sales profession in general
(“I’m rubbish at cold calling”, “ I hate following up quotes”, “selling is
hard”, “sales people are snakes”, “sales success is impossible” )
No one
thinking or talking like this is likely to jump into selling. Why would they? It
sounds so scary.
The issue
here is that many, no most, of your thoughts are unconscious, so your
unconscious thinking has a major effect on your beliefs and actions. Your
unconscious mind backs up your belief that you aren’t very hot at selling by
thrusting the negative examples at you where you weren’t too hot.
But – if
you dig deeper, you’ll find examples where you were great at selling – you’ve just previously dismissed them as
your unconscious mind backs up your embedded beliefs.
These
embedded beliefs go back a long time – probably your early childhood! An example comes to mind where someone I have
worked with had extremely negative thoughts about selling. These beliefs went
back to her own childhood when any doorstep salesmen were ritually abused by
her mother. Sales people were slated long after each short sales visit. No
wonder she developed these unconscious beliefs that all sales people were bad –
which didn’t serve her well when it came to doing her own selling years later.
So what
seeds have you – or others planted about sales? What are you allowing to impact
your beliefs and actions? How are selling terms like ‘cold calling’ ‘objection
handling’, ‘sales presentation’, ‘closing’ affecting your beliefs. One person
at a recent workshop I presented suggested that every time she heard the word
‘closing’ in a sales context she felt a lump in her throat that was choking
her! – such was her unease surrounding that word.
Everyone
can be outstanding at selling. Sales people are not born. Selling is a set of
learned behaviours and learned thinking – once you know the necessary successful
behaviours and thinking you can emulate it.
So think
about those limiting beliefs that are stopping you being outstanding at
selling. Bring them into your consciousness and choose to accept them or reject
them. For the ones you want to reject, a quick way is to think of three
powerful examples where the opposite of this limiting belief was true. You’ll
start to de-stabilise that negative belief and pave the way for an empowering
belief in its wake.
I’m on a
mission to crack this fear of selling and reluctance to sell. Hence my thoughts
here and my event on 19th April where we’ll be identifying conscious
and unconscious beliefs around selling – and banishing them to the ‘deleted
bin’.
