Improving Sale Effectiveness

• How many of you are great at sales?
• How easy is it for you to call and make appointments with prospective clients?
• Have you ever found it difficult to ask for what you want to be paid?
• What are the stories going through your head that get in the way of being better at sales?

This month Jacque Small and I collaborated with Gavin Mills, from Sales Partners, for this article and he was also our guest on Catalyst LIVE!, June 2.

Struggling With Sales Calls
I have perpetually avoided picking up the phone to call people for anything remotely related to sales. And, many of the entrepreneurs I work with are faced with the same challenges. When it comes to calling people about business this little voice goes off in my head: “What will I say? Why would this person want to do business with me? They have probably already hired someone else. What do I possibly have to offer that is better than what others are doing?

Do any of these questions sound familiar?

Another problem you may be having with sales is with asking for what you are worth? How uncomfortable are you with asking for your full price? Have you given yourself a raise in the last 2 years? We can make up all sorts of stories to justify not asking for more money. The economy is in a down turn and business can’t afford it. My price is already all the market will bear; people won’t pay any more for my service. If I ask for too much money, I won’t get the work. I couldn’t charge that, that is way too much money! Notwithstanding, many clients have used my services and had life changing results that are priceless Undervaluing our service is another place where our minds take us out of the game.

Where the Stories Come From
These questions and negative self-talk form part of the nervous chatter that goes on in our head; what Sales Partners affectionately refer to as our Little Voice. In a situation where fear pops up, our brain goes into a self protection mode and our Ego starts to make up a story. The Ego is extremely good at manufacturing interpretations to remove us from the fearful situation. If the story my Ego makes up is strong enough I won’t pick up the phone nor will I ask for more money.

Sales Partners has perfected the Little Voice Management System and other sales training & mentoring techniques to assist you to manage these situations.

Where does the Little Voice come from? How did it get there? Why can’t we just move it out of the way when we need to? It’s because of our conditioning.

Conditioning comes from all the charged emotional memories we have stored up from the countless events and circumstances in our lives. We don’t remember these events on a daily basis, and don’t think about them much at all, until something pushes our buttons. Then the memory is triggered and causes a reaction. The stronger the emotional charge from the original memory, the stronger the reaction in the current situation.

And what happens to our intelligence when emotions go up? Typically intelligence drops, considerably.

Overcoming the Little Voice
Let’s look at the example above of not picking up the phone to make a sales call. Ask yourself if you have ever been rejected. If you answered No, you’re probably lying! Let’s face it – who hasn’t experienced rejection at some point? So when you go to pick up the phone, and you’ve been rejected in the past, the memory of that rejection suddenly pops into your conscious mind and your Little Voice starts sabotaging your thoughts by telling you that this call you’re about to make is High Risk and chances are you’ll get rejected again….!

So what do you do? Some of you won’t even make the call, some of you will make the call with the Fear of rejection in mind – and guess what happens next – yep you get rejected again, and some of you will make the call and have managed that fear in the process. Those of us in this last group, whether we realise it or not, have conditioned ourselves to be able to face the fear and manage the Little Voice so that we can move forward, make the call and get the success we so richly deserve. The rest of us are conditioned to the point of either not making the call or getting rejected and taking it personally.

So why not learn the tools to be able to manage your Little Voice in every situation so that you can make the best decisions, lower your emotions and raise your intelligence so that ultimately you will get the results you really want and be who you really want to be, without any more effort whatsoever.

Little Voice Management Systems are vital in the moment to overcome what your Little Voice is saying and propel you into action. Make the call and ask for more money.

For those people who find this a persistent problem there is a longer term solution that will quiet the Little Voice permanently or have it be just a quiet whisper. This is achieved by removing the emotional hot button causing the Little Voice to scream, “You are in danger of being rejected.” The great news is that Tom Stone at Great Life Technologies has perfected a technique to allow us to dissolve the emotional hot button and eliminate the emotional reactions.
When we eliminate the emotional reactions we don’t have to do nearly as much Little Voice Management and we can put the rest of the sales techniques Gavin teaches us into more effective use, faster.

Wishing you greater sales success;

Lynne Brisdon, Jacque Small and Gavin Mills

Register for the next Emotional Hot Button Removal Workshop