6 Moments of Confidence in Sales

HOW TO SELL WITH CONFIDENCE…… WHEN SELF-DOUBT IS SCREAMING AT YOU

Recently, the area of Confidence in the selling process has become a focus area with several salespeople and teams I am working with.  Most of us know that we need a lot of self-confidence to sell.  Or, at least the salespeople we meet seem to have a lot of self-confidence.

First, I do believe that you need the confidence to sell.  However, there are multiple areas of this emotion we need to examine.  Confidence in one area doesn’t always lead to confidence in other areas.  Also, it’s a continuous challenge to keep your confidence level high.  At any moment, it can come under attack from many different angles:  your product’s performance can suddenly drop, you have a customer quit you and suddenly you doubt yourself, and multiple customer complaints about your company’s accounting leads to doubt about the ability to administer customer orders.  All can bring doubt and a lack of confidence to even the most sure of us all.

Secondly, don’t believe the air of confidence you see with other salespeople.  They have the same doubts and challenges that you do.  Most of us can put on a confident appearance for a sales call.  While in our head we are raging with self-doubt.

Lastly, the advice givers usually tell us to just “have confidence”.  Well, If I could just flip it like a light switch, don’t you think I would have done that?  What we really need are ways to view the situation so we can gain confidence.

So, here you go:

Confidence Moment #1:  Making the phone call or turning down the driveway on a cold call

Potential Cause:  Anxiety, fear of the unknown, not doing a pre-call plan

Solutions:  You only need a few seconds of bravery to pick up the phone and dial or to turn your steering wheel down the prospect’s driveway.  Trust me, once you do, it will be fine.  Next tip, do your pre-call plan.  This involves doing your homework to find out as much as possible about the prospect you can: internet searches, reading the customer’s website, your own company files or senior employees who might know the prospect and other customers in that area who might know the prospect.

Confidence Moment #2: Going back or calling a prospect to gain the second appointment

This confidence moment is after you go out to see the prospect on your first appointment.  Maybe you stopped in for a cold call.  Now you want to go back out and call on them again.  You want to see if they decided to buy from you.

Potential Cause:  not asking enough questions on the initial cold call.  That means you didn’t uncover a need. That means you have no real reason for calling them except to say, “I was just checking in to see if you are interested.”

Solutions:  The ability to get the second appointment happens during the first appointment.  You have to dig deep enough into your questions on your first call to give you a reason to have the second, third, or fourth sales call.  When coming to the end of the first sales call, pull out your phone calendar and set the second appointment.  There’s no better time than right there to set the next appointment.

Confidence Moment #3: Asking a Closing style question

It’s estimated that 50% of all sales calls end without the salesperson asking a closing-style question.  I believe it.  My personal goal in life is to make that statistic zero for everyone I work with.

Potential Cause:  You didn’t find a need for your products.  Often, this is due to “product dumping”.  This refers to going out to the farm and unloading your sales pitch, by telling the producer all about your products.  Then asking if they are interested.

Solutions:  Same solution as in the previous confidence moment.  The confidence to close on a sale is gained during the discovery phase of the selling process.  You have to dig deep enough into your questions on your previous call to give you the confidence to ask a closing-style question.

Listen to the podcast for a recap of the above confidence moments and learn about three additional moments of confidence in sales.

• Confidence Moment #4:  Confidence in your knowledge of your products, your company, or your industry
• Confidence Moment #5:  Confidence in your products or services
• Confidence Moment #6:  Confidence in your company

If you are interested in building your team’s confidence when selling, let’s have a discussion about how! 

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