Is your ego stopping you from making a sale?

One of the key tenets of my Sales Star Coaching Model is that a person’s current beliefs dictate the outcomes they will achieve.

The idea is that the belief (sales = pitching) causes a person to act a certain way (lead with a pitch) and to get a certain result (buyers are not forthcoming because they aren’t given a chance to express their needs).

Since we believe 100% in our current beliefs, they are almost impossible to change.

If we listen to a successful sales call from another salesperson, we’d rather think a buyer was abnormally forthcoming than think we have been unskilled at leading sales conversations.

Rather than damaging our egos, we continue to support beliefs that are not correct.

How Beliefs Change

Every once-in-a-while something happens that challenges those beliefs, as I saw in action when I was growing my own business in South America.? I recruited a fellow named Alfredo to deliver programs in Portuguese and Spanish throughout South America.

Alfredo told me, “Steve, I am looking forward to working with you, but I see one problem. You do not understand the South American market. You want to sell training for $10,000.00 per day. In South America, I am one of the top sales trainers. That’s why you hired me. The best I ever get is $500 per day.”

With Alfredo’s belief in the $500 day rate, I imagined that when a buyer put him under price pressure, he’d roll over like a puppy and discount all the way to $500. Then he’ll call me and say, “See, I was right!”

Beliefs are self-fulfilling, and many of us would rather be right than successful.

We first talked to a comptroller in Sou Paolo and when we got to the pricing, I said, “The fee is $10,000 per day, times two for a two-day bootcamp, times five cities, so that totals to $100,000.00 USD. Is it feasible for us to continue our conversation?”

We had been speaking English up to that point, but at that point she said something loudly in Portuguese.

I know that buyers are trained to flinch when you put your price on the table, and that’s what this was. So I said, “Sounds like that’s a show stopper?”

She said, “The prior comptroller left no money in the training budget!”

I said, “The difference between $100K and $0 sounds too big for us to bridge the gap.”

She said, “Well, maybe I can pull some money out of travel and…”

In the end, she paid $100K and Alfredo learned to believe that other customers would too.

Winning Starts Within

Changing one’s results requires a change of behavior, which requires a change in beliefs.

If you are ready to change your beliefs, and your behavior, consider joining my next Software Sales Bootcamp.

Steve Kraner is NOT a natural salesman. He describes himself as an engineer who crossed over to the dark side. A military officer by training, Steve found himself leading a sales team as a start-up. He had to sell to survive.

This sales tip originally appeared on The Software Sales Guru's website.