Why YOU just need to be YOU when you're selling

If I was visiting your town for the night and I got in touch with you to ask where I should eat, what would you say? And more importantly, how would you respond?

Just think about it for a second. Think how you’ve sold your favourite restaurant to others.

If you asked me, I’d say “You’ve GOT to go to the Three Acres. The food is gorgeous. Everything is locally sourced and cooked fresh. They do these scallops with gruyere cheese as a starter, which are to die for. The fillet steak is divine or the cod or any of the main courses to be fair, and you get loads.

They do an assiette of desserts that give you a taste of all their best ones. All the local celebrities go there, and you can see their pictures on the wall. Make sure you book in advance because they get booked up. Check out their reviews on Trip Advisor. “

I would really go to town on you. I’d be showing you pictures, pulling up the menu, hell, I’d even go with you.

I would do my best to transfer my energy and enthusiasm over to you and I wouldn’t feel any fear or anxiety at all. I would be excited for you. I would feel great and more importantly, I would want you to feel great, by going.

Now you would never consider this to be selling. I am simply influencing you towards doing something I know is going to enhance your life.

If only you would speak to your clients with this same energy, all of your sales problems or fears would disappear.

Selling isn’t difficult or bad. We do it all day, every day with our family and friends. We do it with passion and no fear. In fact, it feels very natural.

So why doesn’t this happen naturally in your firm?

The answer is simple to explain.

When you get to work, you start acting and behaving differently, because you’re at work.

You start to gravitate towards something that actually feels very unnatural. Have you noticed this yourself? When you’re talking to a client, all of a sudden you start talking differently to how you talk to your friends?

The more interesting question, is why?

The only answer I ever hear is “Because that’s what everyone else does.” That’s it.

We fall into this mode of talking differently, dressing differently, acting differently, just because that’s what we’ve seen everyone else do.

I think they call it “being professional.”

You’re told to act professionally at work, but then no-one tells you what that really means. I don’t know either, but I’m sure it’s not to act like somebody you’re not.

You fundamentally change the way you are, to gain the approval of your team and your clients. And there starts the problem. You are now someone you’re not and therefore find it difficult to do something that should come naturally to you – sell.

For you to become the best you can be at selling, you simply have to become the best version of yourself, not a half-baked, diluted, professional version of what you think you should be.

When people become more concerned with how they are perceived, rather than how they can serve, they can never be their best self; they can never have the right level of energy to transfer to a client, and that’s all a sale is – a transfer of energy.

When you focus on you, the energy goes inward.

When you focus on them, it goes out.

And energy, like time, is finite. You only get so much and must protect it fiercely. You must become acutely aware of where and how it’s being channeled.

To become the best salesperson you can ever be, you just have to be you.

You have to uncouple yourself from the version of you, you think you have to be at work and just be you.

I cannot tell you the number of times I have simply given permission to ‘professional’ people to just be themselves and to do what is naturally in their heart.

And now I’m giving you permission to do the same.

Be the best version of you, that you can be.

Talk and communicate with your clients in a way that people who love you, love you to do, and watch the difference it makes.

Your friends and family love you because you are you. And the reason it’s easy at home is because you don’t care what they think of you; you know you’re not being judged so you feel more confident to be you. 

You are enough.

If your clients don’t like you for being you, then they’re not for you and that’s fine.

What we’re all craving for is people just to be their authentic selves, warts and all.

How annoying is it when you hear politicians avoiding questions or lying to cover up a mistake?

Wouldn’t you be more endeared to them if they just said, “We’ve made a mistake here, really sorry, we’re humans doing our best, we messed up and this is what we’re going to do to put it right.” 

Wouldn’t that be so refreshing? Wouldn’t you trust them so much more?

By being your authentic self, the client will naturally trust you so much more because they will believe fully, in the version of you that you’re presenting them with.

If you present a fa?ade, they will see through it and smell it a mile off. 

So, the one thing you need your clients to have is total trust in you, because they need to be able to trust themselves to make the right decision with certainty. But how can they ever have that trust, when what you’re presenting them with is, and I say this with the greatest of respect, a lie.

The litmus test is - if your best friend heard you talking to a client in the way you normally talk to them, would they think you were being authentic or …. weird? And the next question to ask is, if they had only ever seen that side of you, would they still want to be your best friend?

You are not selling services; you are changing people’s lives. Never forget that.

The way that you get to do that is through the way that you make people feel by doing business with you, not just what you do in reconciling their accounts or filing a tax return.

People will forget what you say and forget what you do, but they will never forget how you make them feel.

What people really want from you is an energy and a certainty that they perceive they lack in themselves. They are drawn to it like a magnet.

I bet the reason you follow the people you do on social media is because you believe they have something that you want; that you lack. By connecting with them, you feel closer towards the thing that you want.

When you’re able to change the way people feel when they’re around you, you will never have to worry about selling ever again. When this happens, people want to buy from you and will be asking what else you have to sell to them.

They will buy into your energy and into what you can really do for them – which is to change their lives.

Knowing this, I want you to be careful of where you lose your energy.

Become very aware of the people who take your energy from you and either remove them from your life, or if you can’t, develop ways to better manage your interactions with them.

Become very aware of what information you consume and from where. If you go to bed at night having just listened to the news, or wake up and put it on, stop it. I haven’t listened to the news for over ten years and my children don’t even know what it is.

Become very aware of your negative inner voice and what it’s saying to you. Just listen to it. It’s not you. It’s talking to you and trying to convince you that it is, but it’s not. Just listen to it and it will go quiet.

Learn to be you.

You are enough as you are.

Only you can do you, so do you; not a diluted version of you.

Be you and let your energy shine.

Never let anyone take your energy without your permission.

It’s more valuable than money. But you don’t treat it like it is.

The irony here is that energy is finite, money is not. It’s the transfer of energy that makes the sale that will bring money to you. So if you let your energy be wasted, you won’t have enough in the bank to transfer, in order to make the sale and get the cash.

Protect your energy more than you protect your money, and the greatest protection you can give your energy is to just be you… it’s enough.

You’re enough.