Memory Monsters: The Tyranny of Trauma
Victor Antonio
Keynote Speaker and Author - "Sales Ex Machina”, Relationship Selling" & "Mastering the Upsell | Hall of Fame Sales Speaker |
I’m fascinated by what we store in our memory, but more so by how those memories influence our decision-making process or our (un)willingness to do things.
When training salespeople on overcoming their fear of cold calling I often ask, “Why are you afraid?”??I usually get these types of responses:?
- I don’t know, I just hate bothering people.
- I’m a face-to-face person; phones are impersonal.
- I feel uncomfortable trying to initiate or hold a conversation.
- No one ever answers and if they do, they’re rude.
If you dissect each of these reasons you’ll find that memory, often traumatic, plays a big role in their attitude toward cold calling.
Our belief system is a convoluted mess of memories we've accumulated over the years. These memories determine our attitude toward any given task (e.g., cold calling, presentations, asking for the order, etc.)
For example, when someone says they ‘hate bothering people’, rest assured that sometime in their past they had a negative experience of calling someone and it didn’t go well.?That negative experience is stored, imprinted indelibly, in the caller’s memory which in turn affects their attitude toward cold calling.
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When someone instructs another person to ‘change or adjust their attitude’ towards cold calling, what you’re really asking the person to do is to erase or, at minimum, mute their past experience (i.e., ignore your bad experiences and just get over it).?
That’s not easy!
A negative experience is like a handprint in cement; deep and lasting.?In sales, much like in psychological therapy, you need many wins or sessions, respectively?to ‘mute’ bad past experiences.
To tell someone to ‘just get over it’, doesn’t help!??
Coaching salespeople to be good at cold calling (or any other task) requires helping them overcome the trauma of those bad experiences. You can only do that by showing them, not telling them, through ‘live calls’ or ‘joint calls’ that cold calling isn’t the ‘monster’ they deem it to be.?
Proven Powerful Effective Sales Professional
1 年Awesome... One of the best people that I ever worked under did this exact thing. I didn't call her my manager because I respected her as my leader. Because she lead from the front. When prospecting was down she did not just yell for us to make more calls to set more meetings, she asked for our top 10 prospects for the month and called them herself to make the appointment in front of us. To show us not to be afraid to make the call. After that experience I became one of the top sales persons in that company for over 8 years straight even after she left the company. Thank you Eva Dynell Navarro...