Your Selling

 SELF-CONCEPT THE MASTER PROGRAM OF YOUR PERFORMANCE One of the greatest breakthroughs in the 20th century is the discovery of the selfconcept. Your self-concept is the bundle of beliefs you have about yourself and your world. These beliefs began forming with your very first experiences as a child. Over the years, you have absorbed a complex series of interwoven ideas, doubts, fears, opinions, attitudes, values, expectations, hopes, phobias, taboos and other impressions. You have taken them into your mind and accepted them as true. These are the operating instructions of your sub-conscious computer. They control everything you say, do, think and feel. In the absence of any deliberate change on your part, you will continue doing, thinking, saying, and feeling very much the same way for ever. Just as you have a self-concept of whom you are and what you can do, you also have mini-self-concepts for every individual aspect of your life. These mini-selfconcepts determine how you think, feel and perform with regard to people, sports, health, relationships, work, learning, creativity and everything else you do. YOUR MINI-SELF-CONCEPT FOR HOW MUCH MONEY YOU SHOULD MAKE You have a mini-self-concept for how much money you earn. Whether or not you are happy with your income, it is the amount you have programmed yourself to earn, based on your past earnings and your current belief system. It is your selfconcept level of income. It is your cumulative total of all your experiences with earning money since you got your first job. It is part of your subconscious programming and you tend to earn the same amount of money even if you change jobs or move to another city. It is locked in. For example, if you earn 10% more or above this level, you will do everything possible to get rid of the money. You will have an irresistible urge to go out and spend it, even splurge on buying things you don’t need. If you earn more than you are comfortable with for any period of time, you will feel impelled to invest in things you know nothing about, lend it to people who won’t pay you back, or even give it away. If you earn less than your self-concept level of income, you will start behaving in scrambling behaviours to get your income back to the level that you are comfortable with. You will start working longer and harder and maybe upgrading your skills. You may consider second income opportunities, starting your own business or think about getting a new job where you can earn more. Any change or any attempt to change anything you are doing makes you feel very uncomfortable. By attempting to change, you move out of your comfort zone. You feel increasingly uneasy. You experience stress and tension. If the change is too extreme, your physical and mental health can be affected. You will experience sleeplessness, indigestion or fatigue. You may react with impatience, irritability or anger. You will often feel that you are on an emotional roller coaster. 2 TO EARN MORE MONEY, YOU MUST INCREASE YOUR SELF-CONCEPT LEVEL OF INCOME So if you want to sell more and earn more, you must increase your self-concept level of income. You must increase the amount you think you are capable of earning. You must raise your aspirations, set higher goals and make detailed plans for achieving them. You must begin to see yourself and think about yourself as capable of being one of the highest earning Sales People in your field. You must develop a new selfconcept for sales and income that is more consistent with what you really want to accomplish. Your self-concept determines your level of performance and effectiveness in everything you do. YOUR MINI-SELF-CONCEPTS FOR SELLING In sales, you have mini self-concepts that govern every activity of selling. You have mini-self-concepts for prospecting, for cold-calling, for making appointments, for presenting, for closing, for getting referrals and for making follow-up sales. You have a mini-self-concept for product knowledge, your personal management skills, your level of motivation, and for the way you relate to different types of customers. In every case you will always perform in a manner consistent with the way you see yourself. IDENTIFY YOUR HIGH SELF-CONCEPTS Wherever you have a high self-concept, you do well. If you enjoy working on the telephone, you look forward to telephone prospecting and selling and you do it well. If you have a high self-concept for making presentations or for closing sales, you feel comfortable and competent whenever you are doing them. IDENTIFY YOUR LOW SELF-CONCEPTS Whenever you feel tense or uneasy in selling, it means you have a low-self-concept in that area. You do not feel comfortable whenever you are engaged in that activity. You probably avoid that activity as much as possible. If you are not particularly skilled at a particular activity, you will feel uncomfortable at the very thought of it. If you are not good on the telephone, you will avoid the telephone as much as possible. If you are not good at prospecting, you will avoid prospecting as much as possible. If you are not good at confirming the sale and closing the order, you will choke up at the end of the sales presentation and avoid asking for a commitment from the customer. ‘FEAR OF SUCCESS’ Whenever you feel any kind of stress in selling, your natural tendency will be to return to your comfort zone at a lower level of performance, rather than to continue at what you are doing until you feel comfortable at that new level. Sometimes, this discomfort, which can lead to self-sabotage, is mislabelled the ‘fear of success’. But what it is really is the experience of attempting to achieve at a higher level beyond what you really believe is possible for you. 3 SELF-CONCEPT OF TOP SALES PEOPLE Top Sales People have high self-concepts in every phase of the selling process. They make most of the money that is paid in the sales profession. They are the most respected and esteemed in their organisations and by their customers. Their high, positive self-concepts for sales translate into excellent sales results and great lives for themselves and their families. YOU CAN LEARN HOW TO CREATE A NEW AND BETTER SELF-CONCEPT When you learn how to create a new and better self-concept for yourself as a Sales Person, you can then control your sales results for the rest of your career. Your self-concept is made up of three parts: 1. Your self-ideal 2. Your self-image 3. Your self-esteem YOUR SELF-IDEAL The first part of your self-concept is your self-ideal. Your self-ideal largely determines the direction of your life. It guides the growth and evolution of your character and personality. Your self-ideal is a combination of all the qualities and attributes of other people that you most admire. It is a description of the person you would most like to be if you could embody the qualities that you most aspire to. Throughout your life, you have seen and read about people who demonstrated the qualities of: 1. Courage 2. Confidence 3. Compassion 4. Love 5. Fortitude 6. Perseverance 7. Patience 8. Forgiveness 9. Integrity Over time, these qualities have formed in you an ideal or vision of the very best person you or anyone could possibly become. You may not always live up to the very best that you know but you are constantly striving, even at a sub-conscious level to be more like the kind of person you most admire. In fact, in almost everything you do, you are comparing your activities with these ideal qualities, and you strive to behave consistent with them. Successful Sales People have very clear ideals for themselves and their careers. Unsuccessful Sales People have only fuzzy ideals for themselves if they have any ideals at all. Successful Sales People are clear about wanting to excel in every part of their work and their personal lives. Unsuccessful Sales People don’t give the subject very much thought. 4 One of the many characteristics of successful men and women in every walk of life is that they think continually about whether or not their current behaviours are consistent with their idealised behaviours. Part of your ideals are your goals. As you set higher and more challenging goals for yourself, your self-ideal improves. When you set clear goals of the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live your self-ideal becomes a greater guiding and motivating force in your life. Realize that whatever anyone else has done or become, you can also do or become. An improvement in your self-ideal begins in your imagination. In your imagination, there are no limits except the once you accept. What is your ideal vision of the person you want to become? How would you behave each day if you were already that person? Asking yourself these questions and living your life consistent with the answers is your first step in creating for yourself your ideal image. YOUR SELF-IMAGE The second part of your self-concept is your self-image. Your self-image is the way you see yourself and think about yourself in the present. It is often called your inner mirror. You always behave on the outside in a manner consistent with the picture you see of yourself in the inside. For example if you see yourself as calm, confident and competent in any aspect of selling, whenever you are engaged in that activity, you will feel calm, confident and competent. You will be positive and happy. You will perform well and get excellent results. If for any reason it doesn’t go well at that time, you will throw it off and dismiss it as a temporary situation. Your self-image is clear. In your mind, you see yourself as good, capable and competent in that area. Nothing can disturb your mental picture. THE MOST RAPID RESULTS IN SALES COME FROM CHANGING YOUR SELFIMAGE In sales, after making your presentation and giving your potential customer all the benefits of your product, immediately ask for the sale. Close the deal. Ask the customer to decide. It will either be a Yes or a No. When the potential customer tells you to give him or her time to think it over, smile and tell them politely you are very busy showing your products to other customers so you won’t make call-backs. Tell them they know everything they needed to know to make a buying decision right now. Tell them to just decide now and then. The turning point in your selling career will come when you use this simple closing technique. When you change your self-image and make it more consistent with the results you want. 5 YOUR SELF-ESTEEM The third part of your self-concept is your self-esteem. This is the emotional part of your self-concept. It is the energy source of your inner power. It is the most important single element that determines your attitude and your personality. It is the key to your success in life. Your self-esteem is best described as how much you like yourself. The more you like yourself and respect yourself as a worthwhile and valuable person, the higher your self-esteem. The more that you genuinely feel you are an excellent human being, the more positive and happy you are. Your self-esteem determines your levels of energy, enthusiasm and self-motivation. Your self-esteem is your control valve on your performance and your effectiveness. People with high self-esteem have tremendous personal power and do well at just about anything that they attempt. SUMMARY: SELF-IDEAL, SELF-IMAGE, SELF-ESTEEM Your self-ideal is the person you most want to be, sometime in the future. Your selfideal determines the direction of your life, of your growth and evolution as a human being. Your self-image determines the way you perform in the present. Your self-image is the way you see yourself now, today at the present. Your self-esteem is largely determined by the relationship between your self-image and your self-ideal. It is the way you are performing in your day-to-day activities compared to the way you would be performing if you were the very best person you could possibly be. The more that your day-to-day activities are consistent with the person you want to become, the higher will be your self-esteem. If your ideal is to be well organised, calm and positive and working progressively towards achievement of your goals, and in reality you are behaving in a wellorganised, calm, positive manner, working step-by-step towards achievement of your objectives, you will have a high level of self-esteem. You will like and respect yourself. You will feel happy, healthy and optimistic. You will be a high-performance personality. Self-esteem is the foundation of a positive self-concept. High self-esteem is the critical element in sales success. The more you like and respect yourself, the better you perform in everything you do. Developing and maintaining high levels of selfesteem is the most important thing you can do, every day, in building yourself to the point where you are capable of achieving all your goals. 6 THE MAJOR OBSTACLES TO SALES SUCCESS High self-esteem goes hand-in-hand with great sales success. By the same token, the major cause of sales failure is low self-esteem. LOW SELF-ESTEEM Low self-esteem translates into feelings of: 1. Inferiority 2. Unworthiness 3. Un-deservingness 4. Incompetence 5. Inadequacy 6. Comparing yourself negatively with others, ascribing greater qualities to them than they have and ascribing to yourself, lower capabilities than you possess. 7. Seeing the glass as half-empty instead of half-full Low self-esteem leads to: 1. Stress 2. Negativity 3. Pessimism 4. Fearfulness 5. Self-doubt 6. Tendency to sell yourself short in almost every situation FEAR OF REJECTION In sales, the negative effects of low self-esteem are experienced in the fear of rejection. The fear of rejection is the single biggest obstacle to success in selling. It is the fear of rejection more than anything that holds you back from achieving your full potential. It is the fear of rejection that makes you to settle for far less than you deserve. It is the fear of rejection that makes you to hold back from seeing more and better potential customers. It is the fear of rejection that prevents you from translating your sales calls into more and better sales. It is the fear of rejection that acts as a brake to your potential for greatness in the field of sales. And it is the fear of rejection that you must eliminate if you are going to climb to the top in the field of sales. The one good thing about the fear of rejection is that it is learned. It is an acquired fear. No one is born with it. It is learned through a process of conditioning from early childhood. It is a negative habit pattern that almost everybody develops during the process of growing up. And because it is learned, it can also be unlearned and sometimes, very quickly. When you were born, you had no fears at all except for the fear of falling and the fear of loud noise. Every fear that you have today was taught you by your parents, 7 siblings and others through repetition and reinforcement as you grew up. Your fears are all learned. CONDITIONAL LOVE The fear of rejection or disapproval is based on conditional love. Conditional love occurs for example, when one or both parents make their love and support conditional upon you behaving in a certain way. At an early age, you learned that if you failed to do what your father or mother expected of you, they would withdraw their love and approval. They would be angry and negative. They would use destructive criticism, even physical punishment to get you to do what they wanted you to do. As you grow up, your self-image, the way you see yourself and think about yourself, become more and more dependent upon the way you thought others saw you and thought about you. You might even become hypersensitive to the way people treated you and talk to you. You may start adjusting your behaviour to get other people to like you, respect you and approve of you. You start down the slippery road of compromising your own uniqueness in an attempt to gain the respect and esteem of others. To a greater or lesser degree, we all have fears and concerns about how other people think about us. Adults with low self-esteem are extremely sensitive to the opinions of others and often to the point where they cannot make a decision without getting the approval of someone else. A husband or wife will not make buying decisions without the approval of the other. Grown-up children will not make buying decisions without the approval of their parents. People will not buy things without asking their friends, lawyers, accountants or advisors. In business, people will not make decisions without referring the entire matter to one or more people to gain their approval. In sales, the fear of rejection manifests itself in fear of calling on strangers. It is the root of your reluctance to seek new customers for your products. Fear of rejection causes: 1. Stress 2. Anxiety 3. Depression 4. Fear of rejection paralyses prospecting behaviour and 5. Undermines a Sales Person’s effectiveness in all stages of the sales process Fear of rejection is the primary reason why so many people drop out of sales, blaming the company and the management and going for jobs that pay far less than sales. 8 Many Sales People are afraid to sell to their friends and relatives because of the fear of rejection. The fear of rejection is the fear of not being liked by other people. It is the fear of rudeness, criticism or negativity. It is the fear of hearing the word ‘No!’ (And by the way if you have a fear of the word ‘No’ you have picked the wrong profession of sales to make a living). HOW TO OVERCOME THE FEAR OF REJECTION The starting point to overcome the fear of rejection is to realize that rejection is not personal. Rejection has nothing to do with you as an individual. The customer does not know you well enough to reject you as an individual. The rejection is only associated with the situation and the personality of the customer. It has nothing to do with your personality, integrity or competence. To repeat: rejection is simply not personal. It is a standard reaction to almost any sales proposal in a commercial society. Some of your very best customers will be people who would respond negatively to your first approach. You must expect this. The average Ghanaian is bombarded with hundreds of advertising every single day. Because of message overload, potential customers will always react to you negatively when you first approach them. Customers are busy and sometimes overwhelmed with their activities. Your job is to be calm, patient and persistent and realise that nothing a client says to you can affect you in any way because it is nothing personal. Resolve today to do whatever it will take you to excel at prospecting or looking for new clients both on telephone and making cold calls. Start a study program. Listen to audio tapes on prospecting and selling. Read books and articles on prospecting each day. Start your work earlier every morning practising your prospecting skills. Within 6 months, you will not only be the best prospector in OPPEIN Ghana, but your sales will jump up by more than 500%. You will be promoted to become a Sales Manager with a large salary. In less than a year, you will transform your life and your sales career when you start eradicating the fear of rejection that is holding you back. Change your self-image and now see yourself as an excellent prospector. Your new self-image will determine the way you think, feel and behave. And your potential customers will respond to you with greater openness and interest. Know that it is your attitude and your attitude alone that will determine your results. YOUR JOB NUMBER ONE Fear is and always has been one of the greatest enemies of mankind. It is the greatest obstacle to your success in life and your career. It is both subtle and devastating. It works on you, deep in your subconscious mind and causes you to see 9 the world negatively instead of positively. Fear makes you to interpret events to yourself negatively. It causes you to associate only with people who feel and think the same way you do. You reinforce each other’s fears and beliefs. The cumulative result on your personality and your sales career can be tragic. For you to succeed in sales, your job number one is to eradicate the influence of fear in your life. There is an inverse relationship between fear and your self-esteem. The greater your fears, the lower your self-esteem: the higher your selfesteem, the lower your fears. Everything that you do to raise your self-esteem will decrease the fears that hold you back. Everything you do the decrease your fears will raise your self-esteem and improve your performance. HOW TO ELIMINATE FEAR IN YOUR LIFE 1. DO THE THINGS YOU FEAR Since fears are learned by a repetition of the fear-inducing event or thoughts of those events, fears are unlearned by repeated acts of courage in opposition to the responses of fear. For example, if you are afraid of cold-calling, the way to overcome it is to confront it repeatedly until it goes away. This is called systematic desensitisation. You keep doing it until it no longer holds any fear for you. It is the very best and most effective way of developing courage and confidence in any area of your life. As Ralf Waldo Emerson said ‘Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain’. 2. LEARN TO SPEAK ON YOUR FEET Another way to overcome the fear of rejection is to learn to speak on your feet. Certain fears are bundled together. One of the fears that is bundled to the fear of rejection is the fear of public speaking. Fifty-four per cent of Ghanaian adults rank the fear of public speaking ahead of the fear of death. When you learn to speak on your feet at weekly sales meetings that will be introduced by OPPEIN Ghana at Accra, Regional and District capitals, you will become more confident and self-assured with your interaction with others on a oneto-one basis. When you become a competent public speaker, you will simultaneously become more powerful and persuasive in your prospecting and sales activities. HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR SALES PRESENTATION To succeed in selling OPPEIN products, and any other product or service, you need to first develop your sales presentation skills. 10 When you meet your potential customer, first greet them. Ask the customers politely to allow you to sit on a chair by his or her side so you can show them your file of Oppein products. Get the customers to actually flip or browse through the pages and ask them a series of pre-determined questions. Ask general questions to specific questions. As the potential customers answer your questions, write them down in a note-pad that you should always have with you during your sales calls. When they object, show them why their objections are not valid. You are offering them very high quality products directly from the factories in China where the whole world purchases products for resale. They are buying direct from the factory, through you, cutting out all the middlemen comprising of importers, wholesalers and retailers. After answering their objections, ask them to make a buying decision right there and now! HOW TO SUCCEED IN SELLING Sales success does not necessarily come from prospecting. 1. It comes from being eager to call on new prospects or potential customers. 2. It comes from being eager to present your product or service as the solution to their problems. 3. It comes from being eager to show them why their objections have no merit. 4. It comes from being eager to ask customers to make a buying decision right there and now. 5. It comes from being eager to ask for referrals and to look for ways to sell more to the same customer. And eagerness comes from the self-esteem that emerges naturally when you have confronted and eliminated the fear of rejection. HOW TO MODIFY YOUR SELF-IMAGE Your level of self-esteem will largely determine your level of sales success and how happy, positive and optimistic you feel. Your self-esteem is determined by how much you like, accept and respect yourself. It is determined by how valuable you think you are. Everything you do to boost your self-esteem will improve every part of your life. If you consciously and deliberately act in a positive and professional manner, over and over, you will eventually see yourself as a positive and professional person. You will feel positive and professional in your work with your customers. Your actions which are under your control will generate the feelings and images consistent with your actions. If you act as a top Sales Professional, people will treat you as if you are. You can take a top Sales Person out of a good territory and place him into a poor territory and he will make just as many sales as he made in the good territory. 11 There are seven ways top Sales People in every business and industry see themselves and respond to their prospects and customers. You can think of these as the seven ways to enhance or modify your self-image so that you can also perform like a top Sales Person. 1. SEE YOURSELF AS SELF-EMPLOYED The first and most important quality or self-image is the attitude of self-employment. Your attitude is the way you approach your work, your company, your products and services and your customers and everything you do. This attitude of being in charge of your own economic destiny is the critical distinction between high performers and low performers in selling and in almost every other field. You become completely self-reliant in control of your personal and financial destiny. The biggest mistake you can make in life is to think you are working for somebody. Would you like to make more money? You have to determine how well you perform in your job and how well you are paid. On the first day of every month, take your cheque book and write out a cheque for how much money you want to earn for that month. Date it for the end of the month. Then for the rest of the month, figure out how you are going to sell to make the money. The most important self-image that you must develop is that of seeing yourself as self-responsible and self-employed. From this moment onward, see yourself as completely in charge of everything that happens to you, and if you don’t like what’s going on, it is up to you to change it or improve it in some way. 2. CONSULTING VERSUS SELLING From now onwards, see yourself as a Consultant instead of a Sales Person. See yourself as a problem solver with your product and services rather than selling your products or services. See yourself as a Consultant calling on your clients to help them solve problems and achieve their goals. As a Consultant, you have to ask questions carefully and listen intently. You have to focus your attention on understanding the customer’s situation so that you can make intelligent recommendations based on what the customer really wants and needs. You have to focus and invest your time to learn and know your products and services. You have to spend many hours to familiarize yourself with every single detail of the products and services you sell and what your competitors sell as well. You have to know the features and benefits of your products, the strengths and weaknesses, advantages and shortcomings of what you are offering. You have to have excellent product knowledge which your customers can sense. That will give you and your customers’ greater confidence during the sales conversation. 12 Positioning yourself as a Consultant, you see yourself as a resource for your clients. You see and carry yourself as an advisor, mentor and friend. You become emotionally involved in your sales relationships and become intensely concerned that your products and services should be the ideal solution to the real needs of the customers you are dealing with. You have to differentiate yourself from competitors by being more concerned with helping your customers rather than selling your products. You have to make your customers to feel and know that you care more about them than you are with selling your products to them. You do your homework prior to meeting your customers and you ask probing questions that help you understand the customer’s needs at a deeper level. You sell by tailoring your product or service in such a way that the customer eventually concludes that what you sell is the ideal solution to his or her current problem. This ability to present your product as the ideal solution comes from your taking the time to understand the customer’s business or situation completely before you make any suggestion or recommendations. This is the hallmark of the consulting approach. 3. BECOME A DOCTOR OF SELLING The third self-image practiced by Top Sales People is they see themselves as Doctors of Selling. They see themselves as professionals who work for the best interest of their patients. As a Doctor of Selling, you do not allow the client or patient to determine your sequence of activities or dictate your sales process. In the examination phase, you ask excellent questions, carefully prepared in sequence, which are geared to give you a more thorough knowledge of the customer’s situation. You will not proceed until you are satisfied with what you have uncovered. In the diagnosis phase with the customer, you have to repeat back to the customer the results of your examination and double check with the customer. You ask further questions to confirm and corroborate. The prescription phase is where you show your customer that your products and services are the best available solution. Professionals who sell to customers the same way doctors treat patients find that their sales activities proceed far more smoothly and result in better sales in less time. 13 4. BECOME A STRATEGIC THINKER IN SALES Top Sales People are strategic thinkers. They set clear goals for what they want and they develop organised plans of action to attain them. They think before they act. They plan their work and work their plan. They decide in advance exactly how they are going to get from where they are to where they want to go. As a professional, you should take your time, on weekends, or during the evenings, to think about how you are going to accomplish your sales objectives. You should know exactly what you are doing every minute of every day. You should have a plan for the week, a plan for the month and a plan for the year. You should know how much you are going to earn in a given period and how much you are going to sell to earn it. You should know where your customers are going to come from and have a plan for getting them. With a clear blue print for sales success, covering every aspect of your sales business, you will be more relaxed, confident and capable than a person who feels too busy to plan activities in advance. With a good plan, you have a track to run on. Short-term setbacks and disappointments will not bother you. You will take the long view. You will be more objective and able to detach yourself from any single call, prospect or sale. You will be able to work steadily and systematically without haste or waste. One great benefit of strategic thinking and planning is that engaging in them raises your self-ideal and improves your self-esteem. The more you are focussed and concentrated on achieving clear, written goals, the happier you will be with yourself and your career. 5. GETTING THE JOB DONE A key quality of top Sales People is that they are intensely result-oriented. They can always be counted on to do the job properly and on schedule. This is the way you should see yourself as well. Top Sales People have two qualities: Empathy and ambition. The quality of empathy causes them to be sensitive to the best interests of their customers. The quality of ambition causes them to be focussed on making the sales expected of them. And they manage to keep these two qualities in balance. They are both concerned about the customer and the sale. Intense result orientation requires that you use your time extremely well. You must carefully analyse and separate your high-value prospects and customers from the low-value ones. You must discipline yourself to spend more time with the high-value customers who will give you the highest return on your time. You must always remember that your primary job is to sell your products and services and keep your mind focused on that task in everything you do. 14 6. BEING THE BEST Top Sales People see themselves as having the capacity to become the best in their industry. They have high levels of ambition and their role models are the very best people in their industries. They identify with the most successful Sales People. They read their books, attend their seminars and listen to their tapes. High self-esteem triggers the desire to be better and better. A person who truly likes himself sets excellence as his or her standard. He or she is not afraid to shoot for the stars. When you set high standards for yourself, your reputation with yourself improves immediately. You like and respect yourself more. You believe yourself capable of greater accomplishments and your sales performance improves on the outside as your self-image improves on the inside. The starting point of becoming a top Sales Person in your industry is for you to make a do-or-die decision that you are going to be the best at what you do. That is your number one goal. That is where you are going and your decision to be the best then dictates what you will do each day to achieve it. You recognize that success is a journey, not a destination. Once you have made that commitment, you back it with persistence and determination and work on it continually. 7. PRACTICE GOLDEN RULE SELLING Mentally adopt the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule in selling says; sell unto others as you will have them sell unto you. This means that you sell with the same honesty, integrity, understanding, empathy and thoughtfulness that you would like someone else to use in selling to you. If you would like a Sales Person to take his or her time to thoroughly understand you and your situation before making a recommendation, you do the same thing to your customers. If you would like a Sales Person to give you honest information to help you make an intelligent buying decision, you practice the same with your customers. If you would like a Sales Person to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the strengths and weaknesses of his or her product or service and that of his or her competitors, then you do the same for your customers. The most important part of selling is the emotional component contained in the word ‘caring’. Top sales professionals care about their customers. They care about themselves, their companies, their products and services, and they really care about helping their customers make good buying decisions. Only a genuine honest person can be caring. Only a person with high self-esteem and self-acceptance can reach out and genuinely care about the well-being of others. When you see yourself as a thoroughly knowledgeable, prepared, completely competent, intelligent, warm and caring Sales Professional, you will be able to perform at your best in every situation. You will have the mind-set of top sales people in every industry and you will get the same result. 15 Eighty per cent of your sales success will be determined by what is going on in your mind. It will be determined by the way you think and feel about yourself and your profession. By improving the way you think about yourself and your capabilities, you can improve your performance, sometimes overnight. Your self-concept, the master programme that controls everything you say or do, is complex and multi-faceted. It is affected by everything that you think, feel, see, hear, read, touch, taste and the people and influences around you. Your self-concept is in a constant state of evolution under your own direction, moving you toward or away from your goals and aspirations. You must therefore take complete control of your own inner development, to make sure you are moving in a direction of your own choice. When you see yourself as a self-employed Consultant, you carry yourself with a high level of competence and professionalism. You take charge of your thinking, your emotions and your future. You become the primary creative force in your own life. You become proactive rather than reactive. You make things happen rather than being at the mercy of things that happen. Your customers will then accept you at your own valuation. You will sell at a higher level and you will sell more of your products or services easier than you have ever before. Above all, your customers will respect you more and you will like yourself more as well. As a Doctor of Selling, you see yourself as a thoroughly trained professional, following a specific sequence of examination, diagnosis and prescription with each customer. You carry yourself with confidence. You always act in the best interests of your customers and your customers know it when they deal with you. When you become a strategic thinker and planner you will know what you are doing and why every minute. You know exactly how much money you intend to make and exactly what mix of sales you will have to make to earn it. You feel very much in control of your activities and your career. Because of your intense result-orientation, you never take your eyes off the ball. You know that your job is to make sales and to bring in the orders. You make every minute count. You measure the value of everything you do against the sales results that are expected of you. Your constant and consistent sales performance makes you feel like a winner and boosts your self-esteem as well. You see yourself as one of the best Sales People in your industry. You emulate the behaviours of the top Sales People around you. You act on the outside as if you are already an outstanding sales professional on the inside. As a result, you get continually better at everything you do. Above all, you practice the Golden Rule in selling. You treat your customers the way you want to be treated if you were a customer. You focus on helping them solve 16 their problems or achieve their goals. You really care about them and they know and sense it. As a result of your new ways of thinking, you mould and shape your self-image to be the same as the most successful and highest paid Sales People in any industry. You see yourself the way Top Sales People do. This is the psychology of selling.

Question 1: What is your ideal vision of the person you want to become?