315: Four Strategies for Building Confidence In Sales

<p style="font-weight: 400;">Buyers can smell fear and desperation on salespeople.  When the sales funnel is sad and prospects are few, we panic.  The client picks up on this and unconsciously they hesitate to work with us, because for them something doesn't feel right. We are suffering.  We are reminded of the Sales Manager’s mantra, “don’t tell me about what you have sold in the past, tell me what deals you are doing today”.  Sales is a moving feast where we have to constantly recreate our results every week and the boss pressure to perform is unrelenting.  In these circumstances our confidence can take a battering and we are pushed over the edge into a savage downward spiral, rocketing toward sales oblivion.  Here are four strategies to boost our self-confidence to get back on the bucking bronco that is the sales life.</p> <ol> <li>Self-Acceptance</li> </ol> <p style="font-weight: 400;">We need to stop beating ourselves up when sales are not going well – that is the Sale’s Manager’s joy.  We have to realise we cannot control currency rates, market movements, interest rates, wars, supply chain fiascos, pandemics, etc.  We need to look at what we can control.  In fact, we have perfect control over the most powerful weapon in sales – our time and how we use it.  Once we make that decision to exercise control over what we do every minute of the day, we can start moving our mindset from one of deal poverty, to one of deal abundance.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">We know what we need to be doing, but are we actually spending our days doing that?  If we don’t have clients we need to get busy contacting previous clients where the trail has gone cold and find new clients. Remote working styes has created new barriers to contacting buyers and so we need to adjust what we were doing, to what we need to be doing now. We need to be searching for potential contacts through data banks, LinkedIn, our contacts in the market, the media - anywhere we can locate a name and then we need to call that person.  Yes, we will run in