iSell

Unlock Your Winning Sales Mindset

Leigh Ashton

• Publisher: Ecademy Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781907722660
• eBook ISBN: 9781907722745
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Even when outwardly confident, sales people and business owners often lack the inner confidence and practical strategies to achieve great sales results on a consistent basis. Conventional sales training doesn't address the inner barriers that get in the way of sales success. This book does.With an innovative approach to selling, this book will take you through a process that will: - Help you identify your inner psychological barriers to sales success- Give you the tools to overcome what's holding you back- Teach you how the mind works so that you can maintain high levels of motivation and focus- Help you connect at a deeper level with your clients and prospects- Enable you to close more sales

1
How Your Thinking Determines Your Sales Success

“The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

—John Milton, Poet

Your amazing mind

Your mind has amazing potential. More than you can possibly imagine. It controls everything you do…most of which is completely unconscious. In fact about 95% of what you do is unconscious. You have no real awareness that it’s going on…like the blinking of your eyes, breathing in and out, the blood running through your body, the pulse in your neck, your fingertips on this book and so much more. Until I mentioned them you gave those things no thought at all. They just happen.

Now that’s fine when they have no consequence but sometimes they have very negative effects that get in the way of your success and that’s what you will be exploring in this section. So if you have patterns of behaviour or thinking that get in your way, start to get excited because you are about to uncover these hidden and not so hidden gremlins and find out how to rid yourself of them for good.

Too good to be true? Keep reading with an open mind and make your judgement later. This has worked time and time again for thousands of people and it will work for you too.

So here’s some theory for you. Your mind is split into two parts – the conscious and unconscious mind. Your conscious mind is the logical rational part of you that often talks you out of things. You unconscious mind is where the deep stuff is. It runs and protects your body. It stores your inner thoughts, values, beliefs and processes them to create the behaviours that serve you. In fact it really wants to serve you…so much so that it agrees with everything you tell it.

You unconscious doesn’t know the difference between reality and fantasy so whatever you feed it…it will grow. It doesn’t distinguish between good seeds or bad seeds. So what seeds are you planting? What you really need to know is that the unconscious mind drives you. Plant positive seeds and you’ll reap the magic later. Sow negative seeds and you’re destined to live your life in a sea of negativity.

For example…most people keep their car keys in the same place. You automatically go to that place without thinking. Then, one day you decide to store them somewhere that offers more security, so you move them from the shelf by the front door, to a cupboard in the next room. The first few times after you’ve moved your keys, you set off for the ‘old’ place. Over time, you retrain your unconscious mind to head towards the new location.

Leaving the car keys in the wrong place is relatively harmless stuff – but what about those mass of actions, thinking and habits that you have built up over the years. Many of these will serve you well. Yet other unconscious habits, actions and thoughts will undoubtedly be holding you back. And it’s these negative unconscious habits that can be replaced with positive equivalents to catapult you to the success you desire.

Creating a great relationship with your unconscious mind is an essential part of creating success! Communicate with it on a regular basis. Get to know it. The more aware you are, the easier it is to get the sales success you want.

Communication is key

Having excellent communication skills is vital if you are going to achieve sales success.

When you communicate with others you are creating an experience for the other person. Everything you say has an impact…even the smallest things. What’s interesting is that every word you use will have a unique interpretation for the person you are communicating with. When working with groups I often ask people the first thought that pops into their head when I say the word ‘success’. Interestingly, no two people have ever come back with exactly the same response. Some say ‘promotion’, some say ‘sitting on a beach’, some say ‘loving family’, some say ‘money’. And even if people say they thought of money…when questioned one may have seen a big house, the other the actual word came to mind or maybe a £ or $ image. So imagine a string of words in a sentence and a string of sentences in a conversation and you begin to realise how easy it is to create confusion or misunderstanding.

How does this happen? What causes the mind to do this? (Go with this, the figures coming up are astounding!)

You are subjected to over two million bits of information per second…and that’s a conservative estimate. Your mind can only take in around 134 bits of information per second (that’s 0.0067%). So imagine for a moment somebody giving you two million matches in your right hand and you take 134 of these matches into your left hand…every second. Now what do you think happens to the ones that are left in your right hand? They get discarded. What’s more interesting is how you select the specific 134 each second. You will select the ones that are important or relevant to you and what’s going on in your world right now. This is based on your beliefs, values and all your acquired life experiences and influences up to that point.

Focus of attention

If you believe the world is a rubbish place you will pick the information that supports your belief. Likewise if you believe the world is a great place full of opportunity then that’s the information you will take. Remember your unconscious mind wants to support and agree with you. If you’re having a bad day full of negative thoughts, it won’t say ‘Hey you, don’t be such an idiot’. Remember that time you had a great meeting and closed the sale. You’re great’. No – it just allows your negative thoughts to filter because that’s the way you’ve trained it and it wants to please you.

The reason we all have different interpretations of the word ‘success’ is because our inner world is created from so many variations of the two million bits of information per second. We are all taking different 134 bit sections.

So what’s the lesson here? Easy - What are you focussing on?

It’s really important for you to continually focus on what you want rather than what you don’t want. That way you create the thinking that allows you to take in the positive information that creates and supports your sales success. Doing anything else other than focussing on what you want will ultimately sabotage you – and your sales.

In life, you don’t get what you want, you get what you expect so expect positive outcomes and you’re more likely to get them. When you think that things are going to be tough that creates in you a behaviour that prepares you for that experience.

For example you’re going to a meeting with a dissatisfied customer. All the way there you’re thinking of all the things you’re going to say in your defence. That puts you very firmly on the back foot and in your own space. Very likely you will enter that meeting with an air about you that could well instigate a heavy discussion. By visualising a positive outcome and putting yourself into their space, the behaviour you demonstrate will get a very different response.

Whatever your objective is when you communicate with prospective clients will impact on your expectation and if that’s low or non-existent you may well find yourself creating the very lack of great results that you crave.

Think about it this way…put ‘wealth’ into Google and what do you get? Lots of websites to do with wealth! Put ‘poverty’ into Google and you get sites about poverty. Do they both exist? Of course they do. Focus on what you want, not what you don’t want and you will notice it more and attract more of it.

I want you now to think about a problem you have in your area of sales generation. Once you have something specific in mind answer the following questions.

Go with your immediate response.

What is your problem?

Why is it a problem?

Why do you have this problem?

What caused it?

What are your limitations in solving it?

Who’s to blame?

Why haven’t you solved it yet?

Now do something else for at least 60 seconds that’s completely unrelated before going onto the next part of the exercise.

Welcome back!

I now want you to think of the same issue and answer the following questions. Again, go with your immediate response.

What do you want?

How do you want it to be?

What do you need to get it?

What resources do you already have that will help you get this outcome?

Where are you with regards to achieving it?

What is the next step, which you can take towards getting your outcome?

When will you take this step?

So what did you notice?

The first set of questions would have focused you on the problem itself (what you don’t want) and may have caused some negative emotions.

The second set of questions focused you on the solutions to your problem (what you want) and should have been more empowering. These questions also get your unconscious mind to come up with options for resolution.

Create positive self fulfilling prophecies by focusing on what you want and you will have alread...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. How Your Thinking Determines Your Sales Success
• 2. How Your Beliefs Impact Your Thinking … and Your Results
• 3. Sales and the Inner You
• 4. Putting Yourself in the Right State of Mind
• 5. Managing your Inner Software to Achieve More Sales
• 6. The Next Step
• 7. Modelling Sales Success
• 8. Measuring Up
• 9. Putting it all Together
• 10. If you Manage a Sales Team
• Case Studies and Testimonials
• About the Author