Weekly Sales Tips: Self Coaching for Salespeople
I’ve recently asked a whole lot of salespeople on my Sales365 app to evaluate their own selling skills and to rate just how good they really are.
Looks like some of them are way off.
Let’s talk about self-coaching for sales professionals. I created this poll and I asked salespeople to rate their own selling skills.
If you’re on the app, you probably saw that. And if you’re not on the Sales365 app, why not?
We simply asked people the following:
90% of the respondents stated that they were above average. Did you hear that right? 90% of salespeople said they were better than average. I’m no math major, but I don’t think that’s possible.
It’s not true. That’s impossible!
A whole lot of salespeople out there are somewhat delusional. The question is, why is that the case? Why are they so out of touch with their own ability? Well, it has to do with a psychological phenomenon that we all struggle with and it’s called the superiority bias.
You see, we have a natural tendency to overrate our own abilities. In the United States, for example, 90% of Americans believe that they drive better than average.
That can’t be possible. By the way, this is a natural response in western thought. Not so much in eastern thought, but in western types, we tend to overrate our abilities, our skills, our personality, all kinds of different things. Not me, of course, but everyone else.
The fact of the matter is it’s actually difficult to be self-evaluative about our own aptitudes and our own performance. So this really begins with being honest, right?
How about this? If you drive worse than average, fess up in the comments below. My guess is only 10% of you will do it, but fess up in the comments below.
When we think about how difficult it is to self-coach, this is really why coaches exist. They see things that we just cannot see. But what if you don’t have a performance coach at your side? Can you still self-coach?
Yes, you can.
The first thing we’re gonna do is write out those important elements of a perfect presentation. Might be the perfect greeting or how you discover customer’s motivation, that why question. Maybe how you transition from discovery to demonstration or maybe how you ask for the sale. Start with one of those things and write down your perfect approach. That’s step one.
Step two is to audio record that portion of the presentation. We’re talking about something that might go 15 seconds here, max. It’s not a long presentation. It’s only just one statement or question, but go back now and listen. You see, the issue is that you speak differently than you write.
So what you want to do here is go back and just ask does that sound like me? And then record it again. Listen, make a tweak, record it again. Once you’ve done that several times, it’s time to video record yourself.
Step three, video record that great presentation. And yes, I know it’s uncomfortable. You’re the only one who’s gonna see it. And you will see things on video that you would not have found simply by listening to the audio. So video record it, then go back and video record it again. You wanna do that a number of times and you will be self-coaching your own presentation.
And because everyone loves a bonus, there’s a bonus step four here.
After you’ve gone through and videoed and practiced it several times, go back and listen to your very first audio recording, your first attempt at this technique and compare it to where you are now. Do you know what the greatest by-product of that exercise is gonna be? Confidence.
You will get to the point where you can see your own performance improvement and you’ll be far more confident. Ultimately we learn better when we have a coach at our side, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do some amount of self-coaching.
Be bold, turn on the recorder, turn on the camera. Lights, camera, action, self-coach, get it right.
As always, learn more to earn more friends!
