As many of my seminars are purely mindset / motivation based it’s not the skills (important as they are) so it has to be some element of mindset, but what?

What is that empowers some individuals to walk out and double their sales virtually over night?

My opinion is that the ones who get the instantaneous results are the ones who manage to locate and destroy sales loser beliefs
that are holding them back from what they want to achieve. This 10-step exercise will help you to find and remove any limiting
beliefs that are stopping you from achieving the success that you deserve….

1. Consider different sales situations e.g. cold calling, presenting, negotiation…

Think about your job on a day to day, week to week and month to month basis. Think about different sales situations that you get involved in, particularly ones which you may find difficult or
challenging. Examples might include cold calling, making sales presentations, negotiating, closing, prospecting, dealing with awkward customers, managing service level issues, handling
complaints, fielding sales objections…

2. “What emotions do you experience?”

Get in touch with how you really feel about these situations. If you feel bad it will effect your approach, pace, tone, pitch, words, body language and therefore the results that you get. Our
society is focused on repressing emotions and managing behaviours but ultimately your behaviour will stem from your emotion so it’s important that you reclaim this valuable information.

3. Does this support or limit me? Help or hinder me? Drive success or failure?

Is this emotion useful in this situation? If you’re walking into a major negotiation and you feel scared is that the emotion that you’d like? If you need to cold call and you feel nervous or
devalued does that help? Not likely. Be as honest as you can be here. Everyone experiences unresourceful emotions from time to time. The question should not be whether you do or not but
whether you do anything about it or not!

4. “What do I believe that causes me to feel this way?”

Our emotions are mostly driven by our beliefs about a situation. Two salespeople in the same situation will often feel entirely differently. This is down to their beliefs about that situation.
If sales person 1 thinks that their product is too expensive, when the client says, “It’s very expensive!” they’re likely to think, “Damn it! I knew it!” They’ll probably get depressed and
either walk away or give away their product.

If sales person 2 thinks their product is absolutely worth the money and the client says, “It’s very expensive!” they’re likely to think, “Yeah! But it’s worth it!” and set about asking questions to start to build up the value again in relation to
the client’s business situation.

5. Is this true? Is this absolutely true?

Most of us see our beliefs as reality so once you capture this little bug you need to question it’s reality by asking whether it’s true or not. Often you’ll get the answer that it is true so
keep asking yourself over and over and ask like you mean to get an answer. If it’s not absolutely true then chances are it’s a belief.

6. Has there ever been a time when this wasn’t true?

Your objective now is to find just one time that this wasn’t true. If you can, it’s a belief. Let’s say for example that you believe that cold calling is a waste of time. This belief might
well cause you to feel unmotivated and down when forced into cold calling. Ask yourself if there has ever been a time when this wasn’t true? One time when either you or someone else got
something out of cold calling? If there has then it’s a belief and not a reality.

7. Would a sales superstar believe this?

Still struggling to shake the little critter? Try an out of body experience…. Imagine the best salesperson you can envisage standing next to you. Would they believe this to be true? When
negotiating some people are consistently more successful than others when defending revenues and profits. Much of the reason for this is down to belief.

Try spending some time with the best negotiator you can find and elicit their beliefs. Next time you enter a situation and you find yourself thinking, “We’re going to
have to offer X here to get this?” try asking yourself if your sales superstar would truly believe this? If they wouldn’t, what would they believe?

8. What’s it costing me to believe this?

One powerful way of getting leverage on yourself is to work out the cost to yourself of holding your belief. I once worked with a chap who believed that selling at a 20% margin was the most
that he could ethically commit to. After considering his ethical reasons we studied the performance of the rest of his team who were selling at 25-30% margin. We calculated the personal
financial cost to him of this lost commission over 6 months, 12 months and 10 years! When he realised that 10 years of holding this belief would cost him a villa in Spain he was far
more willing to let it go!

What is your belief costing you… personally, financially, emotionally and spiritually?

9. What evidence contradicts this?

Search for evidence to contradict your beliefs. Most people spend most of their lives collating evidence to support their beliefs. This is fine if they’re superstar beliefs but totally
unproductive when they’re not. Find people who don’t believe the same as you. Study top performers. Listen to clients. Create your own loser belief rebuttal programme. The more evidence that you
have to contradict a belief, the easier it is to let it go.

10. How would I benefit by letting this go now?

Consider what you could achieve by letting your belief go now and adopting a sales superstar belief. How will it benefit you financially and personally? How will you benefit in your career?
How will others see you? What will it do for your relationships? Your morale? And your long-term health? What about your security and your happiness?

For the last 10 years, sales motivational speaker and author, Gavin Ingham has been helping sales people to explode their sales performance by turning self-doubt, fear and lack of motivation into self-belief, confidence and action. With his inspirational approach to sales performance and motivation Gavin combines commercial experience, personal excellence and communications technologies in delivering personal and business sales success.

Visit http://www.gaviningham.net now to join Gavin Ingham’s free newsletter Real World Sales Tools ~ tips, tricks & techniques that will help you to outsell, out-manoeuvre and outclass your competition! Refer us to your friends & colleagues but never to your competition!

Gavin is also founder of http://www.salesessentials.net the online sales resource packed full of top class sales tips that will help you to increase your sales results right now!

The best way to do this is to offer your customers some sort of
information that they can use. This information should be
related to your product or service, but shouldn’t be directly
connected to it. For instance, if you are marketing a piece of
accounting software, you might want to offer your customers some
useful tax tips or money-saving advice.

You could also offer your customers some form of entertainment:
amusing stories, “news of the weird,” interesting trivia, or
just a good joke (of course, I’d keep it clean!). Any of these
will capture your audience’s attention and get them to read your
message. Once you have their attention, it will be much easier
to get them to read about your offer.

You might even be able to turn a series of sales letters into a
“lesson plan” or “mini course” for your clients — most
customers won’t mind reading a sales pitch at the end of each of
these messages, as long as they are getting something out of the
messages — and as long as they aren’t paying to get the
information!

Another added benefit to this approach is that it will help
build your credibility, especially if you are offering useful
advice or information. If you can provide your customers with
information that makes their lives easier, they will be grateful
to you, and will see you as someone who is worth listening to.
Keep giving your customers this kind of service, and they may
actually start looking forward to getting your messages –
imagine THAT happening with a standard email sales letter!

As email becomes more and more popular, competition for our
customers’ valuable time will become keener. One of the best
ways to distinguish ourselves from our competitors is to provide
information that goes beyond just “the sale.” By going beyond
the immediate chance to profit, we can build relationships that
can be mutually profitable to all involved for a long time.

Triggering people’s imagination is not like controlling their
mind. Their imagination is being triggered all day long by TV,
pictures, radio, other people, movies, things they read, etc.
People have complete control over what they imagine. It’s not
like when you unconsciously dream every night.

People use their imagination every day. We all con- jure up
thousands of images in our heads. People use their imagination
to solve problems, to rehearse a future situation, to remember
things, to escape their reality, to mentally practice certain
skills, to brainstorm, etc.

For example, maybe you imagined what you were going to have for
breakfast, lunch or dinner. You mentally smelled it, tasted it,
saw it, felt it or even heard it cooking. It could have affected
you physically too, your stomach may have started growling, your
mouth may have watered, you may have smiled and you may have
licked your lips. Think about this, the food you imagined wasn’t
there, your subconscious mind didn’t distinguish between fantasy
and reality.

Do you see how powerful the imagination can be?

Now how about I suggest you visualize something. Make yourself
comfortable. Relax in your chair, close your eyes and imagine a
juicy, tender steak seasoned to perfection. Take your time.
Enjoy the experience. If you like steaks, you most likely had
some of the same experiences happen to you which were described
above.

The visualization above was open-ended. I just suggested what to
imagine and you did the rest. You created the mental movie or
scene. You used your inner senses, past experiences and future
visuals to experience it how you wanted to. It happened so
quickly that you weren’t consciously aware of it. I also
suggested that you should relax; relaxation is one of the key
ingredients used to open up your prospect’s subconscious mind to
be receptive to your suggestions. People often relax by getting
com- fortable, closing their eyes, wearing loose clothing, etc.

Sometimes it might be difficult to anticipate which mental
suggestion will trigger your target audience to buy. You should
study, survey and communicate with them regularly to know which
images will persuade them to order your product. The more
targeted your suggestion, the less distance it needs to travel
to reach their subconscious mind which means it will persuade
them more quickly.

When you trigger your prospect’s imagination they can go into a
flow state or zone. It’s like when you are totally focused on a
movie or thought and you don’t pay attention to anything else.
You have no time awareness, just like in your subconscious mind.
This flow state can lead them right to your ordering page!

One reason being, when something bad happens, such as being
berated by a customer, it shakes us up a little bit, maybe our
pride has been touched up a little. It plays on our mind like a
disease, and you can’t help but think about it, and what you
could have done differently to avoid the situation.

The bottom line here is, stressing over a minor, unpreventable
incident effects our productivity.

Here are a few ideas to help you get through your day with a
little less stress. And believe me, I understand that these
things are easier said than done, but they are worth some
consideration.

1. When driving into work in the morning, picture yourself in a
positive light. See yourself meeting a new customer and making a
new sale, than establishing what has the potential to become a
relationship that blossoms into something bigger.

This shouldn’t be to hard considering you probably have more
than one success story to recall upon.

Block out any and all bad scenarios from the past. See yourself
as a winner, the person in charge.

2. When you leave the office, leave all of your problems and
worries at the door and forget about them. When you come back
the next day, they will be gone. Nine times out of ten, the
previous days problems are only there in your mind, so stop
thinking about them.

Every day is a new day with new potential, and you are a major
part of it, so see it for what it is. Every new day is a chance
for you to become more successful than you already are, don’t
look at it any other way.

3. Cut down on the caffeine

I know this one might be tough, but it does help considerably.
If you drink a lot of coffee, the caffeine isn’t helping your
nerves. So cut back or switch to decaf, or half regular and half
decaf. (That was my approach).

4. If you are having a particularly rough day, focus on
something positive that is going to happen in you near future. A
happy hour with friends or co-workers, something you have
planned for the weekend, your upcoming vacation, a holiday,
anything positive to assure you that there is life after
whatever is going on at the time.

Don’t worry about the things you can’t do anything about!

So please, the next time the pressures of your work day start to
apply their weight upon your shoulders, think of the positive
things, it will make all the difference.