This is true for anything where you want to master in life, from sports, hobbies, relationships, or any new skills. To achieve sales excellence, it is absolutely crucial. You can have great social skills, a great sales process adherence, be a black belt in your sales methodology, have fantastic communication skills, and a high degree of business acumen. All these things are great and necessary but will not alone help you create sales excellence.
You can have all the knowledge and structure in the world and still fail or have limited success if you don’t have the right mindset. In this article, I will explore this human factor which is the greatest success factor of selling.
Our internal alarm system was developed for our survival
Our primitive brain is quite old and hasn’t evolved at the same rate as modern society. It still uses a primitive alarm system to make sure that we do not do anything crazy, which could potentially put our lives in jeopardy. Brain research shows that we are constantly looking for recognizable patterns to predict the future and ensure our survival. New situations, new behaviour, and ambiguity creates uncertainty and signals of threat.
Since our emergence from Africa, we've learned to avoid getting too close to big, adorable cats with furry collars, as they tend to consider us to be their next meal. We've also learned to keep our hands away from the captivating flames of fires, as they can burn us. While this is a good survival mechanism, it may not always be convenient in modern times where we face complex and novel problems that require a different approach.
The only way to learn and grow is by repeatedly trying new and unfamiliar things until they become familiar. We usually fail multiple times before we start to master a new skill or task. This is normal and one of the most crucial parts of learning and growing. We know that this is true because we have experienced it all our life with skills that we have become good at. One way of looking at it is that you never really fail, you either win or learn.
Have you ever wondered where negative thoughts come from?
Many of us struggle with limiting beliefs, the impostor syndrome, the inner villain who is our biggest critic. Our defensive negative mind has many names. According to a study that I once saw, presented by my friend and former colleague Henrik Larsson Broman, on average, 80% of our thoughts are in fact negative, and less than 10% are about things that really matter, which we actually can do something about. This study said that 40% of the thoughts are about things that will never happen, and 30% are about things that have already happened, and cannot be changed now. This means that most of our negative thoughts are about the past, or potential future, which we cannot influence in the present. As for the remaining negative thoughts:
12% are unjustified concerns about our health,
10% are worries about small and insignificant things,
And only 8% are about things that really matter or justified concerns. What a waste of brain power, don’t you think?
You can manage your mindset to achieve success
Your thoughts - are nothing more than electrical signals or impulses in your brain. (neurons and synapses)
These thoughts create feelings - which are nothing, but chemical substances released in your brain affecting your state, either positively or negatively. E.g. Serotonin, Oxytocin, Dopamine, Endorphins etc. These are empowering feel-good hormones or stress hormones.
Your state affects your Actions, or inactions - Depending on your state, it will either boost your confidence and make you act, or create limiting beliefs about your abilities, making you procrastinate, or not act at all.
This in turn will affect your results - Which can have a big impact on your future and self-esteem. It could either become a positive spiral or a vicious cycle. These are scientifically proven facts rooted in neuroscience and social psychology, and they apply to all areas of life, not just sales. Your mindset is a crucial factor in determining your success in sales and in life at large.
The good thing about this is that we can take control of it. As far as I know, we are the only species that can take a step back and analyze our thoughts and feelings. Well, maybe the dolphins can do this too, I heard that they are very intelligent. I can’t say for sure since I have never talked to a dolphin.
We can identify the thoughts that we are having and ask ourselves; is this really true? Why am I thinking like this? What causes me to feel like this. Is the thought that I am having justified? We can then decide what to think and prime ourselves with positive thoughts, even if we do not really believe them in the beginning.
Mohammed Ali once said in an interview: “I told myself that I was the best in the world, long before I believed it.”
Earlier, I wrote that our thoughts, produce our feelings, which produce a certain action or inaction, which in turn will produce a certain result. If we truly believe this, we can start in the other end. We can decide what result we want and determine what we must do, in order to get this result that we want. Then we can ask ourselves in what state we need to be, how we must feel to do the things we need to do. And to get into that state with empowering feelings, how we must think, and what must we tell ourselves repeatedly until we believe it. This way we can trick the brain to release feel good and empowering hormones and make us unstoppable.
Sounds easy, right? Well, of course not. If it was easy, everyone would be good at it. This also take practice. The trick is to have self-awareness, constantly analyze our thoughts, especially the ones that makes us feel bad or create limiting beliefs.
We need to create habits of telling ourselves that we are able to do something and excel in it. If, and when we tell ourselves that we cannot do something, we need to add the word “yet” after the sentence and figure out how we can learn what we need to do to improve.
Try it and you will see positive results in abundance. This is however not a quick fix, but a daily practice that needs to become a daily habit. Remember, mastery is a never-ending process of continuous improvement, and not an end goal.
Most high-level athletes know that this is true and is part of their mental training. When it comes to sales, managing your mindset is crucial, yet only one of many success factors. There are many more, such as having a good strategy and goals, careful planning, communication skills (questioning, listening, and adaptive communication), rhetorical skills, customer value focus, neutralizing objections and reducing friction, negotiation skills, and much more. And yet, they are all powered by a bulletproof mindset.
Please write your comments or contact me if you have any questions or inquiries.
George Rizopulos