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There is a lot of talk about the need to visualize your goals and outcomes in sales- not least by me!!!
To paraphrase Napoleon Hill in his book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ , If you can visualize it, you can achieve it. It may not be plain sailing but you stand a much better chance. There is also growing evidence from sports psychologists that visualization can be used to develop physical skills. Visualize yourself selling effectively in your inner world and you improve your performance in the real world!
I thought it might be useful for some tips on how to actually visualize.
The way we think and communicate can have a big impact on sales. There is a wide variety of ways in which people think and communicate and these tend to differ by type of job function and by levels of seniority. The more flexible we can be with our communication, the wider group of people with whom we are likely to be effective. If you want your prospects to understand why they should buy your products and services then you should learn to speak their language.
I recently met a very confident woman who confided in me she was sometimes quite nervous in sales situations and yet it never showed. I asked her how she managed to maintain her outer confidence. Her answer was what she called her ‘magic wardrobe’. In her magic wardrobe she has a number of outfits that she puts on that give her special capabilities. She has an imaginary golden outfit that gives her super confidence and she puts this on each day when she goes to work.
I had an accidental sales person come to me a few days ago for a ‘pick me up’ coaching session.
He said to me ‘I must be doing something wrong. No one seems to want to buy.’
When I asked about his activity levels and how many deals had fallen through he told me in the last month he had done three proposals from cold calls, two of which were actually for the same prospect.
I was having a cup of coffee yesterday with Mike McNulty of the Performance Business. Michael specializes in helping people perform their roles in life with confidence and impact. Michael will shortly be giving a free tele-seminar for the Accidental Salesman Club on increasing your personal impact and as we drank our coffee Michael was telling me about his workshops.
One of the things I do with clients is to help them really understand their target audience and the potential motivations to want to buy my clients’ services. The next stage is then to communicate to the target audience and press the emotive buttons. This involves developing stories and case studies etc.
In helping my clients quickly gain clarity I go through an exercise I call Customer Archetypes™ and I thought I would share it with you here as I am sure it will help you better understand your target audience.
I have to tell you that when I first started in sales I struggled with so many of the ideas. You see my experiences of sales people were limited to dodgy double glazing salesmen and people who will not take no for an answer. It seemed that all the techniques were there to manipulate your prospects and do the very thing I detested about the tactics of the double glazing salesmen I had met. This was not helped by certain so called sales experts from America seeming to glorify this manipulative approach.
A typical syndrome with accidental sales people is ‘feast and famine’. You have a dearth of paid work and so you devote your attention to finding new business. Eventually your activity pays off and the opportunities start to show up. You then start delivering and getting stuck into doing what you do best. Meanwhile lead generation activity gradually slows down like an electric fan turned off at the mains. You are too busy enjoying your feast to worry about that lead generation stuff – the feast is going to last forever right?
Whether it is a customer, prospect, or people you meet at networking meetings you want to be remembered favourably and to make a personal impact. But how do you do that? Is it not something that some people have and others lack? That was the theme of a recent free tele-seminar from The Accidental Salesman®
Sometimes it is hard to prioritise our day, our week, or our month. There are so many things competing for our time. I learnt a technique from my days in IT consulting which really helps me prioritise at times when I have far too much on my plate. It is a good start in helping to thin out my list of tasks….
Get a sheet of paper and turn it sideways (ie landscape) and draw 3 columns. Name the columns MUST, SHOULD, COULD respectively.
