29 Nov Is Your Sales Mind in Check?
A sales mindset: the hidden weaknesses to watch out for
In sales, it really is mind over matter. No amount of skills training will overcome a poor selling psychology. In fact, research shows that 80 percent of a person’s success comes down to mindset.
Here are some books I recently came across in 2 different airports:
Imagine in sales where the rejection rate is high. If you fail 70% of the time in baseball you can make it to the Hall of Fame.
Salespeople get rejected during prospecting calls, in the middle of a deal and even at the final stages of closing a deal.
So pretty much there’s a chance of receiving a “No” during any part of our sales process. The weaker your sales mindset is, the higher probability of getting a No, Not Interested, we went with another vendor, etc. during the entire sales process.
It’s why developing the right mindset is so critical to a high-performance salesperson.
There’s also the question of the mindsets of your existing sales staff too. Can you improve their selling psychology through training? Answer: yes, you can.
It’s also the most effective sales training your team can undertake.
“Our biggest breakthroughs have been training in mindset,” says Paul O’Donohue, SalesStar’s Founder and Global CEO. “It makes salespeople far, far more effective.
“We recently had a client, a car dealer, grow by 30 per cent in six months—the market only grew 13 per cent—when we focused on mindset training.”
The 2 sides of a positive sales mindset
There are two parts to the selling mindset: the will to sell and psychological competencies. The top 4% salespeople rank high across both these aspects.
1. The will to sell
Skills, while important, mean nothing if a salesperson lacks the four essential components that fuels a salesperson’s drive to sell. These are:
- Desire: Does the salesperson have a strong desire to be successful? Do they have Goals written down with pictures and due dates?
- Commitment: Do they have unconditional commitment to doing everything they can to hit their targets? Are they prepared to do the stuff that will make them successful even if it is scary or uncomfortable? Whether that’s picking up the phone (cold calling), presenting to a proposal to a group, or having a conversation with a CEO.
- Responsibility: Do they take responsibility for their activities, or do they make excuses? Do they blame external factors on their failure, or do they look internally and ask what they could have done better?
- Outlook: How positive are they? Do they look at a market and see an abundance of opportunities or a scarcity of them? A strong outlook tends to result in more resilient salespeople who can handle rejection.
You either have it, or you don’t
These “willingness to sell” traits are the foundations of a successful selling mindset. Without them, salespeople are ineffective and virtually untrainable.
2. Psychological competencies
There are several psychological barriers that can hold a salesperson back and prevent them from being effective. While they are common—especially in sales teams that struggle to hit their targets—they can be overcome.
These barriers include:
- Need for approval: the need to be liked by others. This weakness gets in the way of asking tough questions to advance a sale. According to Paul, this weakness alone can have a 33 per cent impact on a salesperson’s ability to close a sale.
- Self-limiting beliefs: Selling is about belief. Belief in oneself, the product, the company and the value proposition and price point. Without it, self-limiting beliefs can form, such as “this sales process is ineffective” and “I can’t sell on value”. Even if it’s never verbalized, it can have a massive impact on a salesperson’s psyche.“It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You start to buy into that self-limiting belief,” says Paul. “It then limits the activity you do and how effective you are at it.”
- Uncontrolled emotion: Salespeople who get emotionally involved tend to act erratic and get flustered easily. Their decisions are not always rational, which can cause them to deviate from your sales process.
- Money weakness: Being uncomfortable discussing money, budgets and finance is a major issue for a salesperson. Not only can it prevent them from fully understanding their customer’s needs, but they also tend to discount things and can’t sell on value.
- Buy-cycle weakness: This is the tendency to empathize with people who have a similar buying process to you. If you’re an impulse buyer, you expect others to be as well, which could result being assertive at closing time, and likely to close more and faster deals. Likewise, if you prefer to spend time considering a purchase, you might miss an opportunity to close a sale. You may think the prospects wants to think it over and comparison shop, resulting in blown out sales cycles and can impact closing by 50 per cent.
New Data Shows Sales Weaknesses Cause Powerful Chain Reactions in Salespeople
Add it all up…
These psychological conditions are what Paul refers to as the “human handbrake” as we are often not aware of them and they can slow us down. Combine these weaknesses together: the need for approval with a 33 per cent impact on closing, buy-cycle weakness with a 50 per cent impact, self-limiting beliefs, and money weakness, and it really starts to add up.
Check your sales managers
But what about the mental attitude of sales managers ?
The mindset weaknesses of sales managers and leaders can in turn affect the rest of their sales team. Self-limiting beliefs and buy-cycle weaknesses, for example, can originate in a sales manager and spread to the rest of their team, i.e. instructing team members not to push to close a sale when in fact they should.
A healthy mindset is just one critical step to creating a high-performing sales team.
If you you would like to schedule a call to discuss in more detail to relate better to these weakness, click on my calendar.
Originally posted by The team at SalesStar 20 Mar 2018
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