Confidence = Your Key to Success

“Researchers can predict who the winning bid will belong to without ever hearing any of the pitches.”

~ Chandell Labbozzetta

Why Does Confidence Affect Your Sales?

I was reading the work of some eminent US researches on Predicting Success and Personal Power and I discovered that there are tools and studies out there that objectively measure the impact of Confidence on success.

I wasn’t surprised by their findings, any experienced sales person knows that if you start a sales conversation assuming that it will fail, your assumption will almost certainly prove to be true. The thing that did surprise me was their ability to predict success or failure through a person’s conduct in social settings.

Further investigation of their findings cemented my belief that Sales truly is the #1 Life Skill – you see, your ability to Close Sales has everything to do with your Confidence, and your Confidence has everything to do with how (and even whether) people actually accept what you say.

The Three Sales that Matter

If you are selling a product or service you actually need to make three sales.

1. Sell to Yourself: If you are not convinced that the ‘thing’ you are selling is actually valuable and works as described, then you are unlikely to persuade anyone else. This is like the man who was selling Internet services for a company but who wouldn’t dream of using that provider himself.
2. Sell Your Prospect’s Need to Yourself and Them: If you don’t believe that your product or service will deliver value to your prospect and meet their need then it doesn’t matter how good you think it is objectively is, you will still struggle to sell it persuasively. Similarly, if they don’t believe they need it, they won’t buy. If you’re talking to someone who clearly is a PC user, then they’re not likely to buy Mac software no matter how good it is. Similarly, if you know they’re not interested in software development then Google XD won’t interest them no matter how cheap, powerful, and effective it is.
3. Sell the Result: I didn’t wake up this morning saying, “I need a new mesh wi-fi system (or whatever).” However, I might have woken up thinking, “I wish the internet in my garden was as fast and reliable as the internet in my office.” Tell your prospects how whatever it is you are selling will make their life better and solve a problem that is bothering them.

Miss any one of these three sales and you chance of successfully closing the sale just dropped dramatically. Miss two or all of them, and the only people with whom you’ll successfully close a sale are those who were pre-disposed to buy… And you might even lose some of them!

So What…?

When you make all three of the sales that I just outlined, your Confidence skyrockets because you are talking and selling congruently and authentically.

When we communicate, only about 7% of our message is conveyed through words (even though our words are important), the other 93 percent is conveyed by our behaviour, posture, and the energy we project. If you have made those three sales prior to talking to a client, 100% of your energy is directed toward persuading them of the value of the product and nothing is left to distract your prospect or make him doubt.

I have listened to (painful) recordings of sales conversations where it is clear that either:

1. The sales person doesn’t care whether he makes a sale or not; OR
2. The sales person believes the product they are selling is a other over-priced or useless.

Don’t get me wrong, these people are using the scripts and they don’t speak a word that is out of line.

Listen to their calls, however, and you can unmistakably hear their conviction that this is not a good buy.

It’s Not Just About Your Business Either…

I was out to dinner recently (after lockdown ended) and I happened to overhear a conversation between two women at a nearby table. If you had transcribed the conversation there probably wouldn’t have been anything to tell you that they weren’t getting along, but when you tuned into the body language and energy it was clear that one of them wanted to be elsewhere. She was saying all the right things but communicating all the wrong ones.

In all my NLP training courses and my sales training courses I work with clients to help them control and focus their energy and state so that they can congruently achieve the results they want. Congruent Confidence Projection is a skill that can be learned and used to enhance your personal and business relationships as well as your sales results… And it’s a skill that not only increases your income and impact, but also your happiness and overall satisfaction in life.