Build your sales confidence

Confidence is key to sales success, but we all go through spells when we’re not at our best. Martin Tucker shows us how to get out of a confidence rut.

Back in June, we staged our second #SaasGrowth conference, at Here East, part of London’s Olympic Park. There were over 350 SaaS professionals in the audience, watching more than 40 of London’s foremost SaaS experts share their knowledge. Even if you couldn’t make it, we want to share the inspiration and education with you through our #SaaSGrowth2019 articles.

Martin Tucker

Martin Tucker is the Owner of Gener8, a sales performance consultancy. Gener8 challenges sales and commercially-focused organisations, teams and individuals to sell more, be more profitable and increase their market value.

We previously had Martin to speak at a Sales Confidence event and he brought the house down, so it was great to welcome him to the #SaaSGrowth2019 stage.

The title of Martin’s talk was ‘How Emotional Intelligence Can Increase Sales’. He opened by explaining the link between our thoughts and our performance.

‘Our thinking creates our feeling and emotion. How we intelligently manage our emotion affects our behaviours, such as the communication we have with our customers. That massively affects our performance.’

The conversation with yourself

Our confidence affects our performance, but the reverse is also true. If you’re not performing, it can send your confidence spiralling down, making it harder to perform better. It’s a vicious circle.

High achievers have resilience, which starts with the way they talk to themselves. So, if you’re in a rut and your confidence is low, change the dialogue in your head first.

Here are some ideas you can try.

Focus on the positives

Confidence comes when you take responsibility for your outcomes, good and bad.

When you’re low on confidence, you often feel uncomfortable with taking praise. You feel inferior, not worthy. That’s something you need to change. Start by focusing on the positive aspects of everything you do. Of course, you still need to think about things you can improve, but start with the positives. Martin calls it the 3–2–1 method:

· 3 things that went well

· 2 things that didn’t go quite so well

· 1 think you will focus on next time

After a sales call or meeting, go through your 3–2–1 and you will start to remind yourself that you have the skills to be successful. Confidence follows from there.

Build resilience

In sales, things going wrong is a fact of life. No one is 100% successful 100% of the time. How can you ensure that every time you are knocked down, you bounce back up again? Martin has a formula he calls AMP:

· Accept

· Move on

· Plan

Accept the situation you’re in. You can’t change it. It’s already happened. Don’t let it become bigger in your head.

Next, move on. Take action.

Finally, plan. What do you need to do to turn the situation around? Can you have fun doing it? Adding a touch of humour to things always helps.

What can you learn to ensure it doesn’t happen again?

Over to you

Martin shared some amazing advice on how to maintain your confidence and build resilience, but now we want to know what you think.

What are your tips on staying confident in sales? When you suffer a setback, what do you do to overcome it? What do you tell yourself in your own head?

Leave a comment below and share your knowledge with the Sales Confidence community.