With it you can achieve just about anything, including success in selling. Without it you’ll fail at just about everything, especially sales. And yet the difference between the two states can sometimes be so miniscule as to be totally marginal.
So how do you get self-belief and, perhaps more importantly, how do you hang onto it? To an extent, self-belief is a by-product of arrogance and you can’t function in sales without a healthy dose of arrogance. But you need empathy too – the very best sales people have all three: self-belief, arrogance and empathy. As they say, success breeds success, and once you start, never stop.
Some of the personality/psychological tests of recent years have attempted to measure self-belief and how unshakeable it is. Having lots of self-belief is all very well until a major blow to your self-esteem and your ego turns up which causes you to question yourself – your abilities, your passion, your utter ruthlessness are all put under the spotlight. Are you the sort of person whose self-belief is high enough and tough enough to withstand it? If so, great; if not, well……
Because to finish at the top of the sales league year in, year out, requires a level of self belief not found in the majority of the population. In just the same way that having a high IQ will put you into the top 1%-2% of the population, so will having an unshakeable self belief; “I’m good, and I know it and, from a competitive point of view, I’m better than you and I know it. Out of every ten deals that you and I compete against each other for, I’m going to win at least seven”. As an experienced sales manager and sales director, any sales person on my team with a 70% win rate is a star.
But that mix of self belief, arrogance and empathy is a strange one, as are a lot of the other traits that go to make a really good sales person. What one of the personality tests calls “resource investigator”, the ability to question everything and get answers, the ability to get other people, including prospects, to put their resources into answering your questions, is a major factor, as is what’s called “chairmanship” (the ability to lead and run a meeting despite the fact that there may be a number of much more senior people present).
In any event, that total and utter belief in yourself is paramount. If you don’t believe in yourself, you’ll lose. And so drive plays a factor: what is it that gets you out of bed every day? Drive and self belief together form an unbreakable ring of professional solidity. With them, you can take on the world – and win.
The Sales Controversy
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