Building Real Confidence in Sales
Like So Much in Life, It Is a Marathon
“He had confidence
A little thing called confidence
There's no job too immense when you've got
Confidence.”
from Confidence by Elvis
A large part of being successful in sales is developing sales confidence. Selling with confidence doesn't mean that you feel 100% confident all the time. No one does, even if some want to make you believe they do. Selling with confidence does immediately put a customer at ease, and you can talk to them with conviction and sincerity. Now you are on the road to success.
This confidence has to come from deep within, from being self-aware. Otherwise, it quickly is or at least appears as nothing but arrogance.
Steli Efti shares in a blog post that “managing objections—and many other parts of the sales process—is about transferring confidence. Your prospect has doubts, fears, worries, and concerns about your solution. An objection is simply an expression of these doubts and concerns. Sales is about accomplishing a transfer of confidence. Your job as a sales rep is to transfer the confidence you have in your offer over to them so that they believe in your confidence more than they believe in their doubts.”
As the leader of a sales team, you can help your team members build this confidence and achieve sales success. This is a process, a marathon, and not a sprint. Here are some steps you can take:
Focus and Build Upon Strength Areas
Confident salespeople know their strengths, they can name and describe them, and they work to develop them further.
Research from Gallup found that building on employee strengths is much more effective in raising performance than trying to improve weaknesses. They found that employees become 7.8% more productive when they become aware of their strengths. Teams that focus on strengths every day have 12.5% greater productivity. Individuals who use their strengths every day are 6 times more likely to be engaged on the job and are less likely to leave their company.
Replace Negative Energy with Positive Influences
One of the best ways your salespeople can build their confidence in sales is to surround themselves with successful, goal-oriented people. Do not surround yourself with negative people – misery loves company. Develop a zero-tolerance for negativity. Negative people are just negative to be negative. And it is hard to dig yourself out of a dark, negative hole.
Surround yourself with friends or mentors that are positive. It is almost inevitable that you will turn into a “glass-half-full” person as well.
Learn from the Success of Others
When we're open to learning from others, we benefit from their experience as well as our own, and we can inherit their wisdom and knowledge. By being courageous and selfless enough to embrace others' success, we also get the benefit of greater satisfaction. We feel fulfilled instead of bitter.
A mentor is great for this, but sales leaders should work to build a culture in which salespeople regularly share “tribal knowledge.” As a leader, openly recognize and reward success as a learning opportunity.
Master the Fundamentals
A major source of confidence is knowledge, skills, and habit. Good salespeople must be educated about their prospects, the features, and the benefits of their products or services; they must be completely comfortable with the sales process and know each stage like the back of their hand.
Practical sales training and coaching allows salespeople to make the steps of the sales process a habit.
Apply Mental Strategies
Ken Dooley writes: “What we think has a great impact on our confidence and ability to sell. To determine mental confidence, consider your self-talk. What do you say to yourself when you wake up? Do you have thoughts about how successful or impactful you're going to be? When you have a challenging sale, do you mentally review all the things that are going wrong, or do you keep telling yourself to stay tenacious, and you'll get the sale?
To have confidence as a salesperson, it’s a good idea to fill your mind with positive and encouraging thoughts.”
Learn from Successes and Failures
The secret to confidence in sales is success and failure. It would be best if you exposed yourself to plenty of both, and more so than most people dare to. To be truly confident, you need success. You need to experience the feeling of accomplishing goals and winning in life.
But that’s only the first building block of confidence. Building genuine, unbreakable confidence requires you to experience massive failure. You need to go through hard times, face tough challenges, and take the punches. It's how we react and learn from our failures that make the most significant difference.
In the world of sales, confident people really are more successful. When you increase your and your team’s confidence in sales, you’ll set more meetings, have stronger sales presentations, and close more deals.
Talk to us and find out how interim and fractional sales leaders can help.
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Will Brooks - 7 Tips for Building Confidence in Sales
Steli Efti - The secret to unbreakable confidence in sales (and life)
Gallup - State of the American Workplace
Ken Dooley - 6 keys to building salespeople's confidence and winning more sales
Photo by Anne Gosewehr