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Can You Choose Confidence?

Lacking some confidence? Do you suffer from low self-esteem? As you can imagine, there’s no room in sales for anything less than a winning attitude. So, how do the top producers do it? How do so many of them go from initially lacking the confidence to sell or close a deal to an extreme abundance of self worth?

Here’s the secret to boosting your confidence today; make confidence a choice. Wait, I know what you may be thinking; it sounds too easy. It has to be more difficult than this. Well, it depends upon the foundation and the strategy in which you’re using to build your confidence. Here’s one story that will introduce you to a whole new set of tools to do so; starting with choice.

“So, I guess you could sense a change in the tone of my prep form that I sent you for our sales coaching call today?”

It was Denise calling in for her 7 A.M. coaching call. Prior to each coaching call, clients email me their objectives for the call and their week in review. This way, they stay focused, accountable to their commitments and have the opportunity to celebrate their wins each week.

She was right. “If you are referring to the sentence where you wrote, ‘I feel like getting out of sales completely and getting a mindless job somewhere else, maybe the government,’ or the sentence, ‘maybe I’m not cut out for this’ then yes, I do sense something else may be off here.”

Denise and I have been working together for about seven months now. She’s made incredible breakthroughs in both her performance and her attitude. As a result, she was offered a promotion from Regional Sales Manager to National Account Manager. With this promotion came a territory change as well as a new type of prospect. Where her average sale used to be about $10,000 – $20,000, now her average sale was approximately $250,000.

“What caused this sudden change in attitude?” I inquired.

“Well, you know how we’ve been talking about the prospects that I’ve been filling in my pipeline? At this point in time, many of those prospects should be converting into sales. So, I started making my follow up calls as scheduled. Nothing but “Call me next week” or “Now’s not a good time” or “If you would like to leave a message…”

“I guess you could say that I’m getting a bit antsy. I want some of these deals to close already so that I can post some positive sales numbers towards my quota. As you can probably hear, I’m a little nervous. What if these deals don’t close?”

“You tell me, Denise. What if these deals don’t close?”

“I can tell you this, Keith. It won’t be a good thing! Maybe I never should have taken this national account position. I knew it was going to be a big change from regional sales but I didn’t anticipate such a change in the length of my sales cycle.”

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