How To Boost Your Sales Success, Be More Consistent And Make More Money! www.salesnetics.com Know what you want, what you really, really want! Have a ‘Well Formed Outcome’ The more precisely and positively you can define what it is you want, the more likely you are to achieve it. Think about change as a journey from your present state, to your desired state. The present state is where you are now and the desired state your destination. The desired state must be something that you really want to achieve. It should be realistic and worthwhile. Having the motivation to move towards your desired outcome gives you the drive and energy for your journey. You will need to draw on resources you already have or may need to acquire to achieve your desired state. Becoming clear about why you want to achieve your desired outcome will also identify to you the consequences of you not taking action towards achieving it. It will also help you identify the resources – the skills, support, training, finance etc that you will need and how to go about acquiring them. When I say „what do you want‟ I mean just that. I don‟t mean „what is it that you don‟t want‟, for example „I don‟t want to be poor‟, „I don‟t want to be in a job I hate‟. It is logically impossible to work towards something you don‟t want! By identifying what you do want, for example, „I want to be financially secure‟, „I want to work in a job I love‟, it is generally easier to move towards your desired outcome rather than moving away from what you don‟t want. To really understand why you want this outcome you need to ask yourself, „What‟s important about this?‟ and then, „What will this do for me?‟ Repeat these questions until you have a full and clear understanding of why you desire this outcome. Page 2 How will you recognise it? www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 It‟s important to know how you will recognise when you have been successful in achieving your goal. State now, to yourself, how you will know or recognise it! What will you be feeling? What will you are hearing? What will you are seeing? Is it in black and white or colour? Make it colour. Is it a movie or a snap shot? Make it a movie. Is it clear or fuzzy? Make it crystal clear. Is it near or far away? Make it near and close up. Visualise it through your own eyes, be associated with it. Really get in touch with how you feel, what you hear, and what you see when you have achieved your goal. Flexibility of behaviour Your goal needs to be about you, within your control and one that you feel responsible for achieving. So if you state that your goal is something like „I don‟t want to be ignored by my Sales Manager‟ how would your Sales Manager be behaving if they were not ignoring you? You might say something like „They would be engaging me in conversation more often and be interested in things I have to say‟. The successful outcome of the situation is in your hands! What could you do, have you done, would you be able to do, in order for your Sales Manager to want to…? What resources do you currently possess or need to develop in order to successfully achieve your desired outcome? Retaining positive benefits of old behaviours www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Page It is important to acknowledge and preserve this within the new desired outcome. For example a smoker may smoke in order to have some relaxation time, to breathe deeply or for social purposes. If they stop smoking and don‟t find something positive to give 3 When you set a new goal, be it around relationships, bad habits such as smoking or over eating or changing your limiting beliefs, there will be some win, gain or positive benefit from your existing behaviour. them good feelings associated with the old habit, they may give up the new goal and return to the previous behaviour, perhaps feeling a failure thus impacting on their self belief and esteem causing them to feel even worse than they did before! So what positive benefits are you getting from your old behaviours? Maybe it‟s camaraderie with your sales colleagues complaining about the management or the challenge of generating new prospects or the endless administration you are required to do. If your goal is to be more successful in sales how can you retain the positive benefits from these old habits, i.e. camaraderie and achieve your desired outcome? Side effects What are the possible side effects of achieving your goal? You may stand to lose as well as gain by achieving your desired outcome. This could be something like a change in friendships and peer group, personal relationships, health etc. It is important that your goal is ecologically sound and that you consider up front, possible side effects so that you can address them and not be caught unaware. Stop the stinking thinking! The future looks bright or the future looks bleak. It‟s simply a point of view. What we think about affects our feelings. Our feelings affect how we behave. So, if you want to get better results, change the pattern of your thinking. www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Page Conversely, if you think a meeting will be informative and interesting, it will be. You will find something positive and useful. If you tell yourself that each time you call a client by 4 If you think that winning that new client will be very tough, guess what, it will be very tough. If you think your sales meetings will be boring, you got it, they will be boring. If you tell yourself that prospecting by phone is a waste of time, it will be. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy! phone you are potentially helping them resolve problems for their business you will be more successful in engaging and securing that all important site meeting. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy! I‟m not suggesting that you go around like a deluded „Pollyanna‟, although I‟m puzzled as to why having a positive attitude is so frowned upon, but I do encourage you to adopt a more positive attitude. I‟m sure you have read this famous quote from Henry Ford a hundred times before but it‟s worth while reading again „If you think you can or you think you can‟t, you are rightyou will prove it to yourself‟ Confident, successful people „feed‟ themselves with positive thoughts. Mohammed Ali thought he was „The Greatest‟, he became the greatest (with incredible commitment to training and development) - a self fulfilling prophecy! I am what I am! What makes you, you? Have you ever stopped and considered this? Work through the following short exercise to get an understanding of who you are. What do I do? Where do I do what I do? How do I do what I do? What is important to me about what I do? (What am I passionate about?) What makes me uniquely me? What value do I bring? Managing your ‘Inner Committee’ www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Page How does this feel? How can you use this information to improve your sales success? 5 So, what makes you uniquely you? Write a few sentences about yourself and what makes you unique. Each and every day our 'inner committee' is talking to us. Some people call this voice their „Gremlins‟. Sometimes this talk can be negative, sometimes positive. As you become aware of your 'internal chatter' you become equipped with how to manage the negative, non supportive banter and take positive action to manage it. The first thing to do is become aware of what is going on inside your head. Many of us are not conscious of the chatter until it is pointed out to us. Now that you are aware, what are you hearing? Is it positive, supportive chatter? Or is it negative and unsupportive? Or is it a mixture of both? Take a day or two to monitor what is happening. Note it down, if you can. This may seem a rather simple exercise but it really does increase your awareness and helps you choose how you want to react in a particular situation and build your confidence. Now that you are aware of how much chatter there is you can learn how to control it and how turn down the volume of negative and turn up the volume of the positive chatter! This activity may identify areas that you might wish to explore further with a coach. Create new thought pathways - Are your thoughts leading you in the right direction? We all have strategies, an ordered sequence of thoughts resulting in an ordered sequence of actions, for motivation, decision making, in fact, everything we do. Some are more empowering than others. By understanding the way your strategies are coded you can help yourself to be more successful, more often. Page Your internal representation is built up by the qualities, distinctions and finer details of your mental pictures, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes. 6 Your subconscious uses filters to delete, distort and generalise the information you receive, creating your own internal representation of your experiences, your own map of the world. www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Any distinctions you can identify with your senses in the external world, you can also make in your internal world. You see colours, sense distance and hear variation of sound in your imagination. These are the building blocks of all your memories, thoughts, feelings and emotions. Each is unconsciously composed by your brain, using different combinations of how each picture, sound or feeling is coded. All your experiences are coded and stored in your brain using these building blocks. By becoming aware of these building blocks and how you personally code your experiences using them, you learn to identify the coding associated with the most effective, pleasurable and resourceful states. You can transfer these to situations and memories that are less effective and that cause you pain. But, not all our mental experiences are clearly definable in terms of our senses. Sometimes, for whatever reason, our sensory experiences can get intermixed with our nervous systems. Sometimes, various sensations become connected and overlap so completely that is difficult to easily distinguish one representation from another. In some people a keyword or even colours can trigger a certain unmistakable taste. Other less extreme examples could be a person being deeply moved by listening to a piece of music – where the feeling cannot be clearly distinguished from the sound of the music. The same can be said for reactions people have to certain pleasant or unpleasant images. By becoming aware of this you can assess what triggers are causing you to make unresourceful links and recode your thought patterns. Are your beliefs holding you back, is it time for a revamp? www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Page Your beliefs are the thoughts and ideas that you no longer question. Your beliefs have the power to create or destroy. Every thought, expectation and action is a direct result of 7 The dictionary definition says a belief is, “A principle accepted as true or real without proof. An opinion, a conviction”. your beliefs and because they shape the direction of your life, they deserve your serious examination. How are your beliefs formed, where do they come from and how have they become so well established that you accept them as true without any empirical proof? Initially, they come from other people like your parents, teachers, friends, family, media and religion. The fact is anyone who ever had or still has any influence over you. Your beliefs are formed when you were a child or in adolescence. Cast your mind back to your child hood. How was your behaviour affected by what someone said about you? Maybe a cutting remark from a teacher or a friend made you think twice about putting your hand up in class again, for fear of humiliation or ridicule. Can you recall any strong beliefs that you formed about yourself or your situation? It is extremely likely that those beliefs still influence your behaviour today. If you received positive encouragement from your parents, teachers and peers, you will have the foundation for good, healthy and positive self-beliefs. But, if you were subjected to criticism, ridicule or blame, either real or perceived, then your belief pattern will be more negative and disempowering. Your initial self-image originated from your reaction to the attitudes that other people had towards you. Page 8 By the time you become an adult yourself image is a collection of all the lifetime attitudes and opinions that you have received from others. Your self-image creates your belief of whom and what you are. It is suggested that by the age of 4 or 5, your life script is written. By 7 it has been polished and has the essential character. By 12 years old it is further refined and is beginning to be lived out. www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 But you have the chance to revisit that script, to rewrite it and do something different! So how can your childish thoughts still influence your adult behaviour? Steve is intelligent, hard working and left university with a good degree in computer studies. His creative and innovative ideas are often taken and developed by colleagues because he simply lacks the confidence to voice them in team meetings. Steve’s conversations are full of phrases like “I know this might sound daft”, or “this probably won’t work”. He is hesitant and always seeks approval before proceeding with anything. His beliefs were developed from an early age. The youngest of a family of three, he was completely dominated by two older sisters who made fun of his ideas, who thought they knew best and took over and made all his decisions for him. His resultant belief that he has nothing really useful to contribute completely disempowers and limits him in adult life. Old beliefs established in childhood are projected forward on to new and current situations. The good news is that those beliefs can be changed and turned around. It‟s just a question of reprogramming the subconscious mind. Page The human brain has a cluster of cells that act as a filter to perceptions. It accepts information that is consistent with your beliefs and goals and that fits your picture of your life. At the same time, it filters out any information that is irrelevant and that does not fit with your picture of life. The perceptions that make your picture of life are well-worn and reinforced regularly. 9 The subconscious mind does not evaluate things, it is non-judgmental. This means that it is unable to distinguish between the genuine and true attitudes and those that are false. They are all given the same credence because the subconscious mind takes in everything it is given. www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 What you expect to happen to you often does, like a self-fulfilling prophecy! You interpret life and what happens to you in the light of your beliefs. You search around to find evidence to support your stance to the exclusion of all alternate points of view. If you have had a conversation with someone who is determined to be miserable and who rejects every bright idea, positive thought or slant on a situation, you have been speaking to someone who is simply acting on their belief system. www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Page Conversely, the person who believes the world is an exciting place, full of abundant opportunities has a far more optimistic view of life. They are open to the love and involvement of others and share their lives more freely. It is the same world that each 10 Someone who fundamentally believes that the world is a hostile place, where everyone is „out for what they can get‟ will be less likely to take risk or open up to share their life, gifts and love with others. This person will be uncharitable with his or her self and intolerant of others. inhabits. Yet, you get the picture of the two very different lives, based on two different sets of strongly held beliefs. If you have destructive beliefs about yourself, it is imperative that you change them! Some people are such negative thinkers that they are unable to see any positive future possibilities and are totally lacking in confidence. Even if they achieve some success, they quickly negate the results to make them consistent with their beliefs. They say, “It was a fluke” or “It was a one off, I don‟t normally do that”. In the same situation a confident person would say to themselves “I can do this consistently” or “I will do it again in the future.” When faced with a poor performance or defeat, a confident person says, “This is a one off”, “That‟s not like me” or “I will perform better next time”. They set themselves up for success. However, in the same situation, the negative thinker will say “That‟s just typical”, “What else can I expect?” or “It‟ll be the same again next time”. They set themselves up to fail. Many people are unaware that they hold beliefs about themselves and that those beliefs have such a powerful influence on the quality of all aspects of their lives. You must learn to recognise them and your behaviour associated with them and have the courage to take responsibility for them and change them for the better with the support and guidance of your coach. Page 11 Some people cannot understand why they are not achieving their goals. If their aims and goals are incompatible with their underlying beliefs, there will be conflict. The subconscious mind strives to achieve the goal but the brain is using the belief reference system to ensure that it cannot succeed. The beliefs have to change for the goal to be achieved! www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Stepping out of your ‘comfort zone’ Some people need a lot of support to change their beliefs. They will need to be challenged and encouraged every step of the way as they are guided to the place where they can achieve their full potential. A helpful way to understand how thoughts, feelings and emotions affect self-belief is the concept of a comfort zone. This is a psychological area or zone, within which you feel comfortable and confident. This encourages you to stay put, after all, you are always right when you are here! The trouble is that being always right means that you do not learn. Too learn you must be prepared to work outside your comfort zone, or better still, constantly expand it. Once you are taken beyond your comfort zone, you can start to feel uncomfortable. At the extreme, you may even experience panic attacks, palpitations, nausea, memory loss and lethargy. At a less severe level, think of the „butterflies in the tummy‟ that you experience when you have to do something new for the first time. These psychological and physical experiences influence your performance. Initially, you may be keen to take the first steps to goal achievement but then, you come up against the discomfort and challenge of moving out of your comfort zone, you procrastinate or make excuses. This is where the input of a skilled coach is vital to keep you on track by questioning, encouraging, challenging and championing to keep your vision burning bright. www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Page Your choices are driven by your values, habits, guilt, fear, what others will think, responsibilities, duty, needs, conscience, the consequences and emotions. You can 12 One of the things that make us different from animals is choice. We can choose our response to a given event. Few people make that choice. If something new comes along, it is easy to say, “This doesn‟t fit in with my world”, discard it and the carry on in the same way. Understandable, but it removes the opportunity to learn. justify almost any decision that you make to yourself but you seek to justify it to others as well. If you choose how you respond to an event, then you can spend the rest of your life doing exactly what you want to do. This is the ultimate freedom. But freedom comes at a price. The price is responsibility and responsibility is expressed in values such as honesty and integrity. Freedom of choice, unhampered by limiting beliefs, gives you total responsibility for everything you do with honesty and integrity. You can be whatever you want to be. If you are not where you want to be, you can do something about it. You‟re free will to choose, means that you can spend the rest of your life doing exactly what you want to do. So, to stay where you are and to keep doing what you do, you must really want to be there doing just that – right? You have seen how a positive mental attitude is needed to overcome limiting beliefs and keep going to achieve your goals. You have recognised the significant part that the subconscious mind plays in behaviour and you have learned that it is possible to reprogram your thinking and automatic response to situations. You are aware that you need to step outside and expand your comfort zone. Applying this knowledge will boost your sales success, enable you to be more consistent in your approach and resulting performance and reduce the amount of stress that you experience because you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and a plan on how to achieve it! www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783 Page For more information about our services please call us on 01793 875783 or please visit our website www.salesnetics.com 13 Happy Selling! 14 Page www.salesnetics.com Call 01793 875783