The Inner Game of Selling

Mastering the Hidden Forces that Determine Your Success

Ron Willingham

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781451691344
• eBook ISBN: 9780743293839
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

Selling is 85% emotional and 15% logical. Forget everything you've been taught about selling -- forget the hardsell, forget negotiation strategies, forget those closing techniques. In The Inner Game of Selling, Ron Willingham debunks the familiar myths about "sales skills, " showing that those tired methods are too shallow and manipulative to do anything but alienate potential customers and drain you of energy and dignity. Today's consumers are wise to the old-fashioned gimmicks, extremely informed about their options, and very particular about what they want. The old tricks simply do not work anymore. Willingham, author of Integrity Service and CEO of Integrity Systems, opens your eyes to a whole new truth about selling: Your ability to sell is more a question of who you are than of what you know. Accordingly, why you sell is far more important than how you sell. Salespeople perform according to their inner beliefs about themselves, about what it is possible for them to sell and earn, and about what they deserve to achieve. These beliefs set the boundaries of their self-image and ultimately determine their success or failure. Willingham has synthesized his decades of experience, field-tested research, and a career-long dedication to ethical and passionate salesmanship to arrive at the groundbreaking insight that you will sell at your highest level only when you achieve emotional and spiritual alignment. Your sense of your own self-worth combined with a belief in your product will inspire that crucial ingredient in potential customers: trust. The Inner Game of Selling shows you how to overcome self-limiting beliefs and move on to a new relationship with your customers and, more important, a new relationship with yourself. Your new inner strengths will truly benefit you and your customers in any sales situation. Willingham is at the leading edge of a values shift in sales culture, from product-focus to personal empowerment. The Inner Game of Selling establishes a groundbreaking new paradigm that will utterly transform the philosophy and practice of selling.

1 Self-Understanding
Discovering Why You Sell What You Sell

THERE ARE FORCES DEEP WITHIN YOUR PSYCHE THAT ARE currently influencing at least 85 percent of your sales! You probably have no conscious awareness of them. And it’s more than likely that what you’ve been taught about the causes of success in selling doesn’t even come close to touching these forces.

Just think about that for a moment.

Marianne Szegedy Maszak reports in U.S. News & World Report, “According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about five percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depend on the ninety-five percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.”

What’s this got to do with your sales success? Everything. It literally holds the key to it.

Throughout this book I’ll share a belief that selling is 15 percent knowledge, learned skills, or other intellectual factors; and the other 85 percent unconscious factors, such as attitudes, self-beliefs, feelings of worthiness, and other spiritual and emotional influences.

According to recent research I’m being a bit liberal—leaning too far to the intellectual, conscious knowledge side.

What Controls Your Ability to Sell?

What more than anything else is driving your current sales and career success? The economy? Your product or service? Your knowledge? Your support systems? Your CRM system? Your experience? Your company? Your compensation?

If you said, “Yes” to any of the above questions, I want to challenge you. It’s my belief that a power much deeper than knowledge, outside circumstances, or conditions is driving your ability to sell. It’s an inner power to which everyone has access, but few people actually discover and tap into.

In fact, I’ll also say that your current level of sales success will not appreciatively change until you understand and plug into this unlimited source of energy. You’ll do this as you internalize the actual success factors that I’ll share with you in this book.

What is this deeper power? What are these success factors?

Your Sales Are Always Consistent with What You Deeply Believe to Be Possible for You to Sell

The odds are that you’re currently selling exactly what you unconsciously believe you should be selling. These deep-seated self-estimates give the marching orders, and your habits, activities, and attitudes then, without questioning, carry them out.

Deep inside the recesses of your psychic caverns is written a description of what your achievement possibilities are, and the conscious part of you takes over, without challenges, and carries out these deep subconscious commands. Most often you’ll assume that what you’re currently selling is normal for you. So, without challenging your assumptions, you keep selling what you’ve been selling.

This explains why people plateau, fail, barely hang on, or succeed.

There’s a profound part of you that over your lifetime has developed unconscious beliefs about:

■ Who you are

■ What you’re capable of achieving

■ What level of life rewards you deserve to enjoy.

This internal programming has been influenced by many factors. Among them are your parents, your early upbringing, and the love you experienced or didn’t enjoy. You evaluate the whole of your life experiences and form strong inner perceptions.

All these perceptions were not based on truth, but what you believed to be the “truth.” Whether your perceptions are true or false, if you believe them to be valid, they’ll become your “realities” and then control all your actions, feelings, behavior, and abilities.

We all live out our lives, going with the flow of what we perceive to be our possibilities—rarely challenging these beliefs that aren’t based on fact, but on our presumptions of what our realities are.

The Truth About You

The truth about you is that you have the inner power to achieve any goal you can unconsciously accept to be within your possibilities. If, after discovery, you aren’t satisfied with your current views of your possibilities, you have the power to change them. I want to help you understand this truth in every chapter of this book. You won’t understand it just because I say it to you; you’ll only “get” it experientially by discovery. This won’t happen because you read and know what I wrote; it will only occur as you practice the Action Guides I’ll share with you.

Regardless of your current success, you’ll be able to continue to climb as high as you unconsciously desire to go.

Let’s take it a step further and begin to understand what this power is and where it resides within you.

You’re Made Up of Three Parts

There are three distinct parts of the one you. The model on page 18 will help you understand your own makeup, as well as serve as a framework to change your current life circumstances into whole new realms of higher achievement.

The intellectual “I Think” is the logical, rational, knowledge part of you; the part that learns information, makes decisions, and chooses behaviors or actions. This part decides on and sets goals, but lacks the octane power to carry them out.

But there’s more to us than this conscious, surface level.

The emotional “I Feel” is the part of you that experiences feelings and emotions. For no reason, you may feel down today, but yesterday you felt elated. Someone compliments you and you feel nice. A driver cuts you off at an intersection and you suddenly feel angry. Try as you might, you can’t logically understand the cause and effect of these mood differences.

The Three Dimensions of Human Behavior

Where do your feelings come from? What triggers them? Why can’t you consciously change or even control them?

The creative/unconscious “I Am” is the spiritual dimension within you. Because of this connection with the Infinite it gives you access to unlimited power and energy—once you learn to access and tap into it. Tapping into this power usually involves paradoxical behaviors, ones that tend to conflict with our natural ego-focused thinking.

I’ll explain these dimensions in more detail in a moment, but first let’s understand a basic interaction of these parts.

The Interaction between Your “I Think” and Your “I Am”

Throughout your wide awake hours, your “I Think” is constantly interacting with your “I Am.” These exchanges then trigger the emotions in your “I Feel,” which then powerfully influence your external behaviors.

Notice the graphic on page 19.

The interaction between your conscious “I Think” and your unconscious “I Am” automatically creates an emotion in your “I Feel.” Your emotions are so powerful that they’ll overrule the logic in your conscious “I Think” on average 85 percent of the time and motivate your external behaviors. Said another way, in a contest your conscious willpower, or discipline, is no match for your powerful emotions.

Here are a couple of examples.

Out of every 100 people who enter the life insurance industry, 11 will still be in it as they go into their fourth year. Just think of it: 89 percent don’t make it.

Why?

It’s not for lack of knowledge—whether of the product, the industry, or how to manage their activities. In fact, it’s common for new agents to do well their first few months, only to fade away after the “old pros” educate them about what it takes to be successful, and what level of success is actually possible for them to achieve.

Every salesperson unconsciously answers these questions.

■ “What does it take to be successful?”

■ “Do I have what it takes to be successful?”

Often, because of personal beliefs, there’s a conflict between their answers.

Certain sales skills are taught, and new agents say, “Man, if this is what it takes to make it, I probably can’t do it.” Their conscious understanding of “what it takes” interacts with their unconscious views of “what they have.” A conflict then follows that triggers feelings of doubt, “call-reluctance,” fear of the unknown, and other negatives.

These negative emotions are so powerful they’ll usually obliterate their conscious desire to sell, causing them to mentally and emotionally shut down.

This inner tension defeated them before they even got started.

Your “I Think” can set goals, but if your “I Am” silently screams, “You’re not capable of that,” emotions of doubt and anxiety are triggered in your “I Feel.” This conflict will often cripple your activity level and torpedo your ability to sell. Until the self-beliefs deep within your “I Am” change to fit the higher goals you set, you’ll subconsciously throw all kinds of monkey wrenches into your mental and emotional machinery.

You’ll “prove” to yourself and the world that selling isn’t the business for you.

These conflicts intensify as managers put pressure on salespeople to “try harder,” “make more calls,” or “manage your time better.” The more the pressure builds, the more clogged up and emotionally conflicted salespeople become. The inevitable then happens: they settle for low productivity, or go find another job they think might have less stress and conflict.

What are some answers to these challenges?

Sales Consistency

Here’s my concept of Sales Consistency: People’s sales are always consistent with their internal beliefs about:

1. Who they are

2. What’s possible for them to sell or earn

3. What they deserve to have in life rewards.

One of our greatest emotional needs is for consistency. Predictability. Evenness. To know that future events aren’t going to create waves that lap up over our chin line. One of the ways we manifest this need is to set goals, make decisions, and tackle problems that we’re comfortable handling. Probably 85 percent of all salespeople do this without even knowing it.

There’s an explanation for this emotional phenomenon. Years ago, Dr. Prescott Lecky, a Canadian educator, coined what he called the Theory of Self-Consistency. He developed this to help teachers enable students to learn more effectively. He theorized that our minds are organized systems of ideas, and all the ideas that belong to the system must seem to be consistent with each other.

He went on to state, “The center or nucleus of the mind is in the individual’s conception of himself. If a new idea seems to be consistent with the ideas already present in the system, and particularly with the individual’s conception of himself, it is accepted and assimilated easily. If it seems to be inconsistent, however, it meets resistance and is likely to be rejected.”

What this means is that when the choices, decisions, or commitments you make with your “I Think” are in conflict with the beliefs, values, and self-image in your unconscious “I Am,” a conflict occurs that inhibits your progress toward your goals. The concept of Sales Consistency leads us to understand:

When the choices, decisions, or commitments you make in your “I Think” are consistent with the beliefs, values, and self-image in your unconscious “I Am,” a congruence occurs that accelerates your progress toward your goals.

But this phenomenon works both ways. It allows us to see things we perceive to be consistent with who we are, but it also blocks out anything ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Back Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: How This Book Can Help You
• Chapter 1: Self-Understanding: Discovering Why You Sell What You Sell
• Chapter 2: Boundaries: Examining Your Current Belief Boundaries
• Chapter 3: Breakthrough: Shattering Blockages of Your Success
• Chapter 4: Achievement: Understanding the Four Core Success Factors
• Chapter 5: Abundance: Setting Goals for the Future You
• Chapter 6: Creativity: Discovering Your Creative Goal-Seeking Mechanism
• Chapter 7: Customer Focus: How to Sell the Way Customers Want to Buy
• Chapter 8: Energy: Releasing Unlimited Achievement Drive
• Chapter 9: Control: Handling the Emotional Side of Selling
• Chapter 10: Social Skills: Helping People Feel Understood
• Chapter 11: Self-Talk: Choosing What to Say When You Talk to Yourself
• Chapter 12: Purpose: Finding Meaning in What You Do
• Chapter 13: Values: Deciding What You Stand For
• Afterword
• About the Author