The Fear of Selling
It’s our dirty little secret. It’s not a topic that you hear much about. After all, what self-respecting authority on the subject of professional selling wants to admit that they still sometimes have pangs of doubt in their own sales ability from time to time? You may never read about it, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The Fear of Selling. We have all experienced fear from time to time in our sales experience.
I’m sure that it’s not suprising news that fear is prevelant among most young sales professionals. What may come as a suprise to most is that even the most seasoned and successful sales veterans still have bouts of fear and doubt from time to time, even after years in the trenches. The reason that you might not hear too much about it is because it’s just not cool to talk about it. Why would anyone who is trying to convince you that he is a master saleman want to admit to you that he too is only human and has fears from time to time?
You see, Fear is always lurking. It really doesn’t even matter what profession you happen to be in, fear is a constant reality. Oh sure, either by nuture or nature, some people have more self-confidence than others. But more self-confidence doesn’t make one immune to fear. Someone once said that courage isn’t the abscence of fear, but rather courage is taking action in spite of the presence of fear.
So how do you overcome fear? The best way that I know is to just throw yourself into the fray. Procrastination is the natural defense mechanism to fear. I have found through personel experience that humans are at their creative best when coming up with excuses for not doing something that they might subconsciously fear. We might call it research or training or networking or a host of other activities, but eventually anything that is not selling is just plain old procrastination mascarading as work. It’s not real work. Selling is your real job. So just face your fears and get on that horse and ride. Make those calls. Dial those numbers. Leave those messages. Talk to prospects. Make some appointments. Yes, sales is a numbers game. The more calls you make, the more people you will talk to, the more sales you will make…eventually. If you are new and just starting out, it might take more calls and a little more time to make a sale. But the more time you spend in real selling situations, the better that you will become. And as you encounter more and more success, your fears will be begin to dissappate and your successes will fuel your courage and confidence, creating a self-energizing, perpetual cycle of success. But the first step towards success is just getting started. Just go ahead and take a big leap of faith and just jump into the fray. If you don’t do this, the perpetual cycle that you create could be in the opposite direction. Success breeds success and failure breeds more failures.
I am reminded of a story that went something like this:
A man of good judgement was asked how he acquired his good judgement. His answer was that he acquired his good judgement from experience. When asked how he acquired his experience, he answered that his experience came from bad judgement.
Sales is alot like that. Ask any great sales person how they became a great at selling and if they answer you honestly, they will say that experience is the only way to become great at selling. And the only way to get experience is to learn by trial and error and on the job learning. If experience is the best teacher, then making mistakes is the textbook.
Don’t be afraid to fail. In fact, it is in demanding perfection from ourselves that we don’t allow ourselves to act until we are sure that we won’t fail. This is the basis of all of our fears. In waiting for the moment that we are sure we won’t fail, we never act, because that moment never arrives.
In fact, even after you take my advice and make the plunge and create the successful habit of acting in the face of fear, you will find success. But you won’t lose your fears. You will only have acquired the courage to act in spite of your fears.
Relationships and Networking
Relationships and Networking
Relationships and Networking. You can’t have one without the other. The process of building a relationship is also the process of adding to your network and vice versa. You cannot build an effective network without building relationships and every time you forge a new relationship you add to your network.
Most people think networking involves handing out as many of your business cards to as many people as you can, as fast as you can. Nothing could be futher from the truth. Networking is the process of building deep, long-term relationships based on mutual benefits. In fact, a good rule of thumb for all relationships is to seek first to help others before seeking others to help you.
We all have goals that we are striving for. If you want to find the quickest way to make a friend, find out what their goals are and then find a way to help them reach those goals.
Another rule of thumb for relationships is to not expect anything in return for helping others. The rule of reciprocity will take care of that for you. The rule of reciprocity is sort of like Karma. If you help others without expecting anything in return, you will be paid back somewhere, sometime and typically your return will be exponetially compounded.
If you want to know if you are an effective networker, ask yourself when was the last time that you helped out someone in your network. Maybe someone looking for a job. Or perhaps you gave someone a hot sales lead. Maybe you just introduced two people together because you thought they might hit it off. These are just some of the ways that you can become an effective networker. The bottom line is that if you want to be an effective networker, you have to consciously find ways to connect people together. The more you help people in your network, the stronger your network becomes and as your network becomes stronger, it becomes a much better tool for you to use to your advantage.
Think about the internet. When it was first created, the world wide web was limited in its usefulness because not everyone had a computer. In addition,at its inception, the internet was not very organized. But as personal computers began to take hold in more and more households, more and more people began to contribute time, work and other resources to the internet in the form of more and more web sites. As the amount of people using the internet grew, the amount of resources available also grew. The internet is really only about a decade old and it has already become a major source of education, intertainment, research and even just plain old flippant distractions. What’s even more exciting is that we on just barely on the cusp of the internet’s birth and there is no telling what new ideas might result in the future. All because we “networked” all of the world’s computers together.
This is the same idea behind networking. Everyone in the world is connected by six degrees of seperation. If you keep this in mind, along with the fact that nothing great was ever accomplished by a single person, then the power of networking not only makes great sense, but it makes no sense NOT to do it.
PS: A great sales article at cio.com was recently brought to my attention. I thought it was worth mentioning to my readers. Check it out at http://www.cio.com/article/124957
