The Secret to Making More Sales

Have you ever wondered why it's always the same people who are making the sales? While you know your pitch quite well, have studied the product inside out and attend every sales training invented? Throughout my career in sales I have observed many successful and unsuccessful sales people and let me tell you that the ones that were making the sales all had one thing in common, and that was confidence. A client can sniff out an insecure sales person in seconds. They can instinctively tell if you’re unsure of yourself and don’t have confidence in your product.

I once worked with two sales guys in Mexico, selling condos to North Americans. One guy *Tim was English and well spoken, had a PHD, handsome, very well dressed and knew his product inside out. Now the other guy *Jose, his English was not that great, a high school drop-out, average looking, dressed quite badly and when speaking to him you gathered that he didn't know much. Now who do you think was the top sales person out of those two? You may be surprised to find out that it was Jose. Tim on the other hand was struggling to meet his monthly targets and was given many warnings about his performance. What was Jose’s secret you may wonder? Well I did wonder and had the privilege of shadowing both these guys. Let me tell you that while Tim was quite a great conversationalist, built rapport and had an implacable sales presentation, he just couldn't close the deal. What Tim lacked was confidence. Confidence in his abilities as a person and confidence in what he was selling. Jose on the other hand had an indifferent attitude throughout his whole sales pitch, was a bit cocky and acted as though he was doing the customer a favor to be giving them his precious time.

Now I’m not advising you to go out to every sales meeting and be rude to your customer to show that you’re a confident sales person. But what is important is that you work on your self beliefs. So how do we get confidence? If I waved a magic wand, are you going to suddenly be overwhelmed with confidence? Maybe not. Natural confidence does take a bit of work, and with using the NLP ‘limiting beliefs tools’ it can be eliminated quite fast. However what should you do in the meantime? I’m sure you may have heard of the term ‘Fake it till you make it?’ Well that’s a start.

Let’s try something out. I’m going to ask you to stand tall, put your shoulders back, take a deep breath and smile. Now make that smile as wide as you can and stay like that for at least two minute. How do you feel now? To even go further think about a really happy time in your life when your felt thrilled and try and anchor those emotions into your present state. How do you feel now? Now think about another time when you also felt excited. Recall all those emotions of how you felt. Do you feel excited? Okay now think of another time when you felt happy, excited and confident all at once. Now anchor those feelings as well. Put your self back there, feel what you felt, see what you saw, hear what you heard, smell what you smelt. Evoke all of your senses, really feel those emotions. How do you feel now? Shifting your state with physicality and thoughts are that simple. So just say you went out to meet your client and just shifted your physicality into a more confident sales person? Imagine that during your sales presentation the only thoughts that invaded your mind were of how brilliant you are and of all your achievements? And how about if you found some benefits in buying your product and thought of how lucky that the clients are to be purchasing from you and not dodgy Bob from down the road? So faking confidence through your physicality and thoughts doesn't have to be so difficult and with practice you will start to naturally feel confident without giving it much thought.

Now I hear some people say, 'but I don't want to be fake.' or 'I hate fake people.' Fair points I must say, I personally don't like fake people neither, especially those with bad intentions. So perhaps we can reframe how we look at it as being fake and rather see it as doing some internal adjustments to boost both happiness and confidence. Because in reality who doesn't want to feel confident? Which person wants to sit in the corner and watch life happen as all the other more self assured people get a large slice of the cake? Whether it's for professional development or personal relationships developing self worth is vital.

I personally learned the art of confidence quite early on in my sales career and once I discovered NLP I was able to take it a lot further. In the end I got to know Jose quite well and realized that deep down inside he had his insecurities like all of us, but he simply knew the secret to getting whatever he wanted in life, and his secret was called confidence.