You can be the most confident person. But when faced with something you haven’t done before your confidence can drop to an all time low. This can result in you putting off doing the one thing you need to do.
You’ve started your business and you’re feeling excited. At last you can do what you’re passionate about. You have the experience and you’ve done the training in your chosen field. It’s now time to start building your business so that it earns you a living.
Then you have a wobble. You worry that you’re not good enough and that no one will buy what you offer. On top of that, you’ve just realised you have no idea how to sell. You’ve never sold anything before or you have but some years ago and for someone else.
Selling yourself and the product or service that you’ve created all of a sudden feels really scary. Your confidence has just gone from 10 to minus 1 in the space of 10 minutes.
So how do you build confidence to sell when you have little or no experience in sales?
I cannot stress enough how important personal development is to your success. If you don’t make time for it you run the risk of stagnating, personally and professionally. Spend at least 30 minutes every day on building your confidence.
Here are a couple of ideas:
Ensure you know your product or service inside out and back to front. This will help you to confidently convey how it can solve your prospect’s problem or challenge. But only if you know who your ideal client is. Don’t get too hung up on creating an in depth ideal client if you’re just starting out in business. That will come with the more clients you work with. Just have a good idea of the type of person who has the problem you solve.
As a little bonus here; make sure you know and understand the industry your prospective client is in.
The more you know, the more confident you’ll feel.
Before making any sales or follow up call make sure you are prepared by creating a plan. Have the questions you’re going to ask ready so that you’re not fumbling around. Decide beforehand how you’re going to record your prospect’s answers. This is so you can refer back to them when needed throughout the call. So if you’re going to use pen and paper, make sure you have plenty of paper and a spare pen!
If it’s a follow up call, have your notes from your previous session in front of you. Make sure you have read over them to familiarise yourself with your prospect’s situation. Being prepared will help you feel more confident.
This tip is really important. It’s something I ALWAYS do before I get on a sales or follow up call; notice your feelings. What is your current emotional state? When you think about making the call, does it make you feel excited or anxious? If it’s the latter then you need to change your state before you make the call.
If you’re excited then just hold on to that feeling and those positive thoughts.
A sales process is your roadmap to getting sales. It’s a series of 5-7 steps that takes a prospect along their sales journey, hopefully resulting in a sale. Once you have created a sales process you feel comfortable with, study it well so that you know the order of each step.
When you do something you know well, you are more confident. It’s like learning to drive. When you had your first few driving lessons, did you feel as confident driving as you do now? I doubt it. But the more lessons you had, the easier it got until it became second nature. You became a confident driver by driving more.
It’s the same for sales. The more sales you get the more confident you will become. And the more confident you become, the more sales you will get.
I did 11 consecutive appointments once without getting a sale. How did I deal with it?By just moving on to each appointment with the mindset of ‘next’. I actually ended up closing 8 of them when I followed up with them!
But my point is that you won’t sell to every single person you speak to. Don’t take it personally. It’s either just not right for them or it’s not the right time. Don’t let getting a ‘no’ discourage you from making that next call.
If you would like help to skyrocket your sales confidence then click the button below to arrange a chat with me….