Sales Blog with Sales Tips

How you view yourself has a profound effect on your success as a sales professional. Do you see yourself as living life from a position of confident strength? Or do you live each day fearing loss?

The Implications
Sales professionals who believe they have all the elements to succeed, usually do. Those who constantly work at vigilantly protecting what they have, don’t succeed. The universe is funny that way.

Living In A World Of Scarcity
If you believe most of the following things about yourself (be honest with your answers), your sales perspective is one of defensiveness and scarcity. You believe life is a zero-sum game. Your job is to protect what you have. You waste a lot of energy chasing demons that don’t exist.

• I feel desperate to fit in and get in. I live in a “pick me, pick me” world.
• The world is all about me. I’m the axis of my world.
• I need and want everyone to adore me. Every prospect is a qualified prospect to me.
• I must protect my current situation. I’m closed to new things, and change is usually bad.
• I have to be the center of attention. I talk too much and don’t sincerely listen to others.
• I feel deficient in many areas. I work hard to hide this from my employer and customers.
• I live in a small envelope of comfort. I’m afraid of failure, but I don’t want to reach too high either.

Living In A World Of Abundance
If the following better describes you (again, be honest with your answers), your approach to sales is one of abundance. Being the person God made you – mixed with hard work – will bring you all the things you need to be a sales rainmaker.

• Just being myself is enough to attract others to me. People are comfortable around me, and I feel no need to perform.
• Not everyone is right for me. Not all prospects are right for my company or me either.
• I don’t see all people as competitors to my success. It recharges my batteries to help others.
• I’m always available psychologically to others. I’m in the moment. I want to hear what they’re saying.
• I feel no need to change anything about myself. Just being me is enough.
• I’m confident that all things are possible for me. I don’t waste energy on building walls that limit me.

Sales Tips Wrap Up
What you see when you look in the mirror not only greatly affects your outlook on life, but it profoundly influences how others see you. They notice your “vibe.” Customers are attracted to those who are comfortable in their own skin. Seeing life from an abundant perspective allows you to do this.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

When it comes to personal relationships I agree with the belief that indifference is worse than hate. If someone hates you, at least he or she knows you’re alive.

Sales professionals get into trouble in this area because we so desperately want our customers and prospects to love us.  We can’t bear to think about their hate or indifference.

In sales, the absence of love in a customer/sales professional relationship is not always a losing proposition. Indifference, however, is another story.

Love Is Nice, But…
Below are some hard and cold facts about customer/sales professional relationships.

1. Customers don’t have to love us to buy from us. Your customers deal with many sales professionals in the course of their work. These are big girls and boys who understand they won’t have stellar chemistry with all of their suppliers’ representatives. They’re primarily interested in our quality and service.

2. Just because a prospect loves you doesn’t mean they’ll buy from you. There is nothing sadder than watching sales professionals focus (i.e. waste) 100% of their efforts on “the relationship.” They are invited to the prospects’ holiday parties and even attend the Bar Mitzvahs for the employees’ kids.

These sales professionals lose sight of the ultimate objectives – selling and making money. As one customer told me many years ago, “We know you like us, Scott, and we like you. But we understand you’re not here just to become better buddies with us.”

3. Standing out – even in a goofy way – is far better than being forgotten. Never leave a prospect in a state of emotional neutrality. Leave them excited or happy or frustrated or dissatisfied with the status quo, but never leave them disinterested. You’ll be forgotten.

4. Customers don’t gravitate to sales professionals whom they perceive as needing love and affection. People pick up the “I need to be loved” vibe and they respond in a negative way.

5. Hand shaking, sweet talking, lunch taking, promo giving, nice looking, suit wearing, nice smelling sales professionals are a dime a dozen. The “love me formula” is so universal in sales that we all look the same to the customer. They don’t even see us.

A huge field of beautiful sunflowers is nice eye candy, but not a single one of the flowers stands out. They are individually forgettable. You’ll also be forgettable if you fail to remember there’s more to a business transaction than trying to grease the wheels of the relationship.

Sales Tips Wrap Up
We all know that good relationships are critical to selling. However, we aren’t required to have a love affair with all of our prospects and customers in order to sell to them. Customer and prospect indifference is our biggest enemy when it comes to relationships. Indifference equals invisibility.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

The reason our customers buy from our company is because of us. This truth tells us that sales professionals need to focus on their personal value – versus corporate value – when interacting with customers.

Corporate Value
During our initial sales training, we are drilled on our company’s corporate value propositions. These are all the things our company does that are presumably better and theoretically different from our competitors.

However, in the eyes of the customer, our competitors look more like our brothers or sisters. Our customers don’t fully appreciate all the effort our marketing department is expending in an attempt to differentiate between our company and our competitors. Companies are very limited in the number of believable value propositions they can actually come up with.

But, there is one clear differentiator we have complete control over. Our competitors can’t replicate it.  It’s one that makes all the difference. One with an endless number of possibilities.

You.

Personal Value
Faithfully towing the company line and exclusively promoting corporate value propositions causes us to miss many opportunities to stand out from the crowd. It is also much easier to differentiate ourselves through personal value instead of corporate value.

We are not restricted in the number of ways for us to personally be prominent and distinct in our industry. The principle of personal value is right under our nose and we’re not using it to our advantage.

A Simple Example Of Personal Value We Can Add Right Now
As sales professionals, we tend to fixate on all the problems our customers’ voicemail systems cause us.

How about our own voicemail and the problems it causes our customers? We can differentiate ourselves from 99% of our competitors by merely updating our voicemail on a daily basis and returning calls according to what we’ve promised in our voicemail greeting.

If we’re going to be out of the office, we must say so and let callers know when they can expect us to return their call. Most importantly, we must ensure that we return their call precisely as we’ve indicated – never make them wait more than two hours for a return call.

By updating our voicemail every morning, we look up to date, relevant and like a sales professional who is on top of things.

Sales Blog Epilogue
The example above is but one of many easy and straightforward personal differentiators that make us look proactive and professional. We are only limited by our imagination and the industry we serve when it comes to creating our own personal value propositions.

©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer