Sales Training Basics: You Are What You Believe
Before you continue reading, it might be helpful to have something in mind that frustrates you about your performance – a hang-up, fear, or general sense of inadequacy. Think about that for a moment and then read on.
If you’re like… well, everyone, you’ve got your fair share of hang-ups and frustrations that affect your performance in sales. Sales training basics teach us many valuable techniques, but without belief, all the methods in the world won’t get us to top-performing status.
When we face a challenge or a doubt about our abilities, we have two options:
- Work around it.
- Work through it.
The natural tendency is to work around it – to compensate by applying strength in another area.
For example, perhaps you find that you are strong in a face-to-face conversation but not so strong on the telephone. You will tend to rely on electronic communication (e-mails) and stay away from phone calls as much as possible.
This could be related to different topics: closing skills, model demonstration technique, overcoming objections, listening skills, difficulty with specific buyer profiles – we all struggle somewhere.
If you are to overcome that deficiency in your work life (or your personal life, for that matter), you need to understand the true nature of the problem. We (erroneously) tend to focus on the result: did we get the sale? But if we are going to overcome the problem, we need to step back and focus first on the behaviors that brought us to the result.
If we are going to understand the behaviors truly, we must first analyze our beliefs. The progression is as follows:
Beliefs → Behaviors → Results.
Our beliefs drive our behaviors, and our behaviors drive our results.
This is true on both the positive and the negative sides. On the positive, if I excel in a specific area – overcoming objections, for example – the positive results are driven by the fact that I utilize the right behaviors when I get an objection. But I can only do that if I first believe in my ability to get this right.
On the negative side, If I struggle in a specific area – say listening skills – it is not because of my inability to nod my head, or feedback on what they are saying, or listen between the lines… these are all behaviors. The problem lies in my belief: if I do not believe I am a good listener, my behavior and results will inevitably suffer.
It might be time to face your fears and identify the beliefs beneath them. If you’re struggling with a result, take two steps back in looking first at the beliefs and then at the behaviors. And if you want to do this right, I HIGHLY recommend you have this conversation with someone you trust. It is far easier to overcome these issues with an outside perspective.
What frustrates you today about your own performance? Perhaps a belief change is in order.
