read it and write down words of vocabulary THE INNER
GAME OF SELLING

Visualize this thing that you want. See it, feel it, believe in it.
Make your mental blueprint, and begin to build.
—ROBERT COLLIER
Nothing happens until a sale takes place. Salespeople are some of the most important people in our society. Without sales, our entire society would come to a grinding halt.

The only real creators of wealth in our society are businesses. Businesses produce all products and services. Businesses create all profits and wealth. Businesses pay all salaries and benefits. The health of the business community in any city, state, or nation is the key determinant of the quality of life and standard of living of the people in that geographical area.

You Are Important

Salespeople are the most vital people in any business. Without sales, the biggest and most sophisticated companies shut down. Sales are the spark plug in the engine of free enterprise. There is a direct relationship between the success of the sales community and the success of the entire country. The more vibrant the level of sales, the more successful and profitable is that industry or area.

Salespeople pay for all the schools, hospitals, private and public charities, libraries, parks, and all good things that are vital to our standard of living. Salespeople—through their sales and the profits and taxes created by successful companies—pay for government at all levels, for all welfare, unemployment insurance, social security, Medicare, and other benefits. Salespeople are essential to our way of life.

Salespeople Are the Movers and Shakers

President Calvin Coolidge once said, “The business of America is business.” If you strip down the major newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily, and the major business magazines, such as Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, Inc., Business 2.0, Wired, and Fast Company, almost everything they write about has something to do with sales. All of our financial markets, including the prices of stocks, bonds, and commodities, as well as current interest rates, have to do with sales. As a professional salesperson, you are a “mover and shaker” in our society. The only question is, how well do you sell?

For many years, sales was considered to be a second-rate occupation. Many people were embarrassed to tell others that they were in sales. There was a general bias against salespeople. Recently, the president of a Fortune 500 company told a journalist, “Around here, we consider sales to be the sleazy side of our business.”

The Best Companies

This attitude is changing quickly. Today, the very best companies have the very best salespeople. The second-best companies have the second-best salespeople. The third-best companies are on their way out of business. The most successful organizations in the world are all superb selling organizations.

Hundreds of universities now offer courses in professional selling, a great change from a few years ago. Many young people are coming out of college and immediately seeking positions in sales with large companies. More CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have come up through the ranks from sales than from any other part of the company.

More CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have come up through the ranks from sales than from any other part of the company.
The most powerful businesswoman in America today is Carly Fiorena, president and CEO of Hewlett Packard. After obtaining a degree in medieval history from Stanford, she went to work at AT&T in sales and worked her way up. Pat Mulcahy, the president of Xerox, also worked her way up from sales. Many of the top companies in the world are headed by former salespeople.

High Income and Job Security

You can be proud to be a sales professional. Your ability to sell can give you a high income and lifelong job security. No matter how many changes take place in the economy, there will always be a need for top salespeople. Regardless of how many companies and industries become obsolete or just go out of business, good salespeople will always be in high demand. By becoming excellent in sales, you can accomplish any financial goal you set for yourself.

Seventy-four percent of self-made millionaires in America are entrepreneurs, people who start and build their own businesses. They get an idea for a product or service that no one else is offering, or which they feel they can offer better than the competition, and they start their own businesses. And among entrepreneurs, the single most important skill for success is the ability to sell. Every other skill can be hired away from someone else. But the ability to sell is the key factor determining a company’s success or failure.

Five percent of self-made millionaires in America are salespeople who have worked for other companies all their lives. Salespeople today are some of the highest-paid people in America, often earning more than doctors, lawyers, architects, and persons with extensive academic degrees.

Sales is a gainful profession. In sales, there is no ceiling on your income. If you are properly trained, are skilled, and are selling the right product in the right market, there is no limit to the amount of money you can make. Selling is the only field in our society where you can start with little skill or training, come from any background, and be making a great living in a matter of three to twelve months.

The 80/20 Rule in Selling

When I started selling, someone told me about the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. He said, “The top 20 percent of salespeople make 80 percent of the money, and the bottom 80 percent only make 20 percent of the money.”

Wow! I was young, and this was a real eye-opener for me. I made a decision, right then, that I was going to be in the top 20 percent. Later I learned that this was one of the most momentous decisions and turning points of my life.

Again, the top 20 percent of salespeople make 80 percent of the sales and 80 percent of the money. The bottom 80 percent of salespeople only make 20 percent. Your mission is to decide to join the top 20 percent, and then to learn how to get there.

The Pareto principle also applies to the top 20 percent of salespeople. It says that the top 20 percent of the top 20 percent, which equals the top 4 percent, earn 80 percent of the money in the top 20 percent of salespeople. Wow! In every large sales force, four or five people out of one hundred make as many sales and earn as much money as all the rest put together.

Never Worry About Money

There is a very good reason to get into the top 20 percent, and then later, into the top 4 percent: you will never have to worry about money again or fret about job security. You’ll never lose sleep over employment. The people in the top 20 percent or better are some of the happiest people in our society.

On the other hand, the people in the bottom 80 percent are worried about money. One of the great tragedies of our society, the most affluent in human history, is that the majority of people worry about money most of the time. They get up in the morning thinking about their money problems. They think about how little money they have all day long. When they come home at night, they talk and often argue about money and how much everything costs. This is not a good way to live.

Top People Earn Vastly More

The people in the top 20 percent, on average, earn sixteen times the average income of the people in the bottom 80 percent. Those in the top 4 percent earn on average sixteen times that of the folks in the bottom 20 percent. This is astonishing!

A large American insurance company tested this 80/20 rule some years ago with their several thousand agents nationwide. They discovered that they had individual agents throughout the country who alone were selling and earning more than twenty to thirty other full-time, trained, professional agents, even though they were all selling the same products to the same people, at the same prices out of the same offices, under the same competitive conditions.

In the same year, I addressed two elite groups in two different industries. The people in these industries had all started off on the street, dialing for dollars out of the newspaper or the Yellow Pages. They all worked on straight commission, one sale at a time. But the average yearly income of the salespeople in these elite groups was $833,000 and $850,000. Some of the top people in these groups earned several million dollars a year on straight commission!

Your goal must therefore be to get into the top 20 percent, and then the top 10 percent, the top 5 percent, the top 4 percent, and so on. The purpose of this book is to get you there. It is to take you from wherever you are today to wherever you want to go in the future. It is to make you one of the highest-paid people in your industry.

The Winning Edge

If the top 20 percent of salespeople in an industry earn 80 percent of the money, and the top 20 percent of companies in an industry earn 80 percent of the profits, what are the distinguishing factors of these individuals and organizations that make such an incredible difference possible? The conclusion is that they have developed the winning edge in their fields.

This winning edge concept is one of the most important management and sales ideas of the twenty-first century. This principle says, “Small differences in ability can lead to enormous differences in results.” The difference between the top performers and the average or mediocre performers is not a huge difference in talent or ability. Often, it is just a few small things done consistently and well, over and over again.

Win by a Nose

For example, if a horse runs in a race and wins by a nose, it wins ten times the prize money of the horse that loses by a nose. Here’s the question: Is the horse that wins by a nose ten times faster than the horse that loses by a nose? Is it 10 percent faster? No. It is only a nose faster, but that translates into a 1,000 percent difference in prize money.

If a salesperson gets the sale in a competitive market, does it mean that he or she is ten times better than the salesperson who lost the sale? Of course not! Sometimes it is only a small technicality that causes a customer to buy from one person rather than another. The fact is, the salesperson who wins the sale may be only a “nose” better than the one who loses it.

Salespeople have a disadvantage over horses. There are no consolation prizes. If a horse comes in second or third, he still comes in “in the money.” But in selling it is a “winner take all” transaction. The salesperson who loses the sale gets nothing, no matter how many hours he or she has invested in developing the sale.

Become a Little Bit Better

In selling, you only have to be a little bit better and different in each of the key result areas of selling for it to accumulate into an extraordinary difference in income. A small increment of skill or ability, just 3 or 4 percent, can give you the winning edge. It can put you in the top 20 percent, and then the top 10 percent.

In selling, you only have to be a little bit better and different in each of the key result areas of selling for it to accumulate into an extraordinary difference in income.
Once you develop this small lead, like compound interest, it continues to grow. At first, you move slightly ahead of the crowd. As you use your additional skills, you get better and better at them. The better you become, the better results you get. You soon begin to pull ahead of the crowd by a larger and larger margin. In a few years, or even a few months, you can be earning five or ten times as much as others who are still performing at average levels.

Characteristics of Top Salespeople

There are certain characteristics that separate successful salespeople from average salespeople. These qualities have been identified over the years through interviews, surveys, and exhaustive research. We also know two things: First, no one is born with these qualities. Second, all of these qualities are learnable through practice. You can develop the characteristics that will virtually guarantee an extraordinary quality of life for yourself.

It was once believed that people were successful because they came from the right families, had the right educations, developed the right contacts, got good grades in school, and other measurable factors. But then researchers discovered that there were people who started with none of these advantages, yet ended up at the top of their professions.

Starting from Nothing

One of the best proofs of this is the number of new immigrants who arrive in this country with little money, no contacts, no school or university background, limited English skills, and every other conceivable disadvantage. But somehow, in a few years, they have overcome every single difficulty and have become leaders in their field.

In my seminars, I continually meet men and women from all over the world who came to this country with nothing and who are now top salespeople, highly paid, and even self-made millionaires. In every case, the reasons have more to do with what is going on inside of them than with what is going on outside.

Success Is Mental

It is what goes on inside the mind of the salesperson that makes all the difference. Some years ago, Harvard University did a study of sixteen thousand salespeople and found that the basic qualities that determine success or failure in selling were all mental. If a person had certain qualities, he or she would succeed, holding constant for everything else. If you develop these psychological qualities, they then form the foundation for your own personal sales success.

If you want to know how tall a building is going to be, you look at how deep they dig the foundation for that building. The deeper the foundation, the taller the building. In the same way, the deeper your foundation of knowledge and skill, the greater the life that you will be able to build.

Once you have built your foundation and have become absolutely excellent at selling, you can go anywhere and write your own ticket. And you can always build your foundation deeper.

Use More of Your Potential

The average salesperson uses only a small percentage of his potential for effectiveness in selling. It is estimated that the average person in general never uses more than about 10 percent of his potential. What this means is that each person has at least 90 percent or more potential left untapped. It is when you learn how to unlock this additional 90 percent of your own potential that you move yourself into the income categories of the highest earners.

Follow the Leaders

If your goal is to be in the top 10 percent of salespeople in your field, the first thing you do is find out who is already in the top 10 percent. Instead of following the followers, the average performers in your business, follow the leaders. Compare yourself to the top people. Remember, no one is better than you, and no one is smarter than you. If someone is doing better than you, it just means that he or she has discovered the cause-and-effect relationships in selling success before you have.

British philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “The very best proof that something can be done is that someone else has already done it.” This means that if someone else is earning five or ten times as much as you, this is evidence that you can earn the same amount if you simply learn how. Remember, everyone starts at the bottom and works his way up. If someone is doing better than you, find out how he got from the bottom to where he is today. Sometimes the very best way to find this out is to go and ask him. He will probably tell you. Top people are usually willing to help other people who want to succeed.

Your Master Program

The most noteworthy breakthrough in psychology and human performance in the twentieth century was the discovery of the self-concept. Your self-concept is the bundle of beliefs that you have about yourself. It is the way you see yourself and think about yourself in every area of your life. Your self-concept is the “master program” of your subconscious computer. It is like an operating system that determines everything you say, think, feel, and do.

There is a direct relationship between your self-concept, on the one hand, and your performance and effectiveness, on the other. You always perform on the outside in the manner consistent with your self-concept. All change/improvement in your life begins when you alter and improve your self-concept, your inner programming.

Not only do you have an overall self-concept that determines how you think and feel generally about yourself, your life, and other people, but you also have a series of “mini self-concepts.” These are little self-concepts that determine your effectiveness and performance in each area of your life, from riding a bicycle to making a speech.

Your Self-Concept in Selling

For example, in selling you have a self-concept with regard to yourself and prospecting. If you have a high, positive self-concept, then prospecting is no problem for you. You get up in the morning eager to call on new people. You are competent and confident in the area of prospecting, so your sales pipeline is always full.

If you have a poor self-concept with regard to prospecting, you will approach prospecting with fear and anxiety. You will avoid it wherever possible. The very idea of prospecting will make you tense and uneasy. You will do as little of it as possible and continually look for ways to avoid the activity. This is true in every other area of selling as well.

What Determines Your Income

Every salesperson already has a self-concept for the amount of money that he or she earns. Psychologists have found that you can never earn 10 percent more or less than your self-concept level of income. If you earn 10 percent more than you think you are entitled to, you will immediately engage in compensating behaviors to get rid of the money. If you have a great month and earn more than you had expected, you will have an irresistible urge to spend it on dinners, travel, clothes, or something else. It will burn a hole in your pocket.

If you earn 10 percent or more below your self-concept level of income, you will engage in scrambling behaviors. You will start thinking about working longer, harder, smarter, better, in order to get your income back up into your “comfort zone.” Once you get into your comfort zone, you will relax and breathe a deep sigh of relief.

Change Your Comfort Zone

The only way you can increase your sales income is by expanding your comfort zone with regard to the amount you earn. Some people have a comfort zone of $50,000 a year. At that level, they relax and coast. Others have a comfort zone of $100,000 a year. That is the level that they strive toward, and they only relax when they hit that target.

Here is the cosmic joke: there is usually very little difference in talent between the person who earns $50,000 per year and the one who earns $100,000 per year. The only difference is that one has settled at a lower level while the other has refused to settle for less than $100,000.

Reset Your Financial “Thermostat”

You can never earn more on the outside than you can on the inside. It is almost as if you have an “income thermostat” that determines your financial temperature. As you know, when a thermostat is set at a certain temperature, it will continually adjust the heating and cooling to keep the room at that temperature. In the same way, if you see yourself as a $50,000-a-year person, you will continually engage in behaviors that keep your income at $50,000.

You can never earn more on the outside than you can on the inside. It is almost as if you have an “income thermostat” that determines your financial temperature.
In my seminars and in my work for corporations, I constantly run into this strange phenomenon. A salesperson will set a goal to earn $50,000 or $60,000 in the course of the year. But then he has a great year and hits the $50,000 mark by the end of September. Suddenly, for some reason, the sales dry up. He stops selling for the rest of the year. He cannot seem to get himself motivated, no matter how good the market is for his product. He spins his wheels until December 31. Then, on January 1, he is out of the gate like a horse at a horse race, and selling again. In every case, it is his self-concept.

Sometimes people set a goal to earn a certain amount in a particular month. But if they have a great month and they earn their self-concept amount by the middle of the month, they stop selling for the next two weeks. They can hardly wait until the first of the month so they can psychologically get themselves back into selling. This is quite common.

Break Free of the Past

Many people hold themselves back because they think that it is not right for them to earn more than their fathers. Time and time again, I have seen salespeople who plateau at a certain income level because that is the highest amount that their fathers ever earned. At an unconscious level they have decided that they do not earn more than that amount. And this becomes true for them.

In an extreme case I saw, a young man moved from the farm into the city and got a job selling satellite dishes to farmers. This salesman came from a poor background and had never earned very much money. But the harvest was good that year, and the farmers were buying $5,000 satellite dishes with both hands. He began making money faster than he had ever dreamed in his life.

But the experience of making so much money so quickly was so traumatic for him that after a couple of sales at the beginning of the week, he would actually go home, turn off all the lights in his small apartment, crawl under the covers in his bed, and lie there in the dark with his heart pounding. He was so far out of his self-concept range of income that the stress was overwhelming him.

Change Your Mind

To increase your income, you must achieve your financial goals in your mind before you can ever achieve them in your reality. Your aim should be to increase your self-concept level of income bit by bit until you think, see, and feel yourself as a higher-income earner.

Imagine yourself as if you were already the kind of person you want to be, earning the kind of money you want to earn. Look at other people who are earning more money than you and imagine that you are exactly like them. Suppose that you are already financially independent. Picture yourself having all the money you will ever need and only making sales calls because you enjoy meeting new people. This calm, confident, relaxed attitude, as if you were already a wealthy person, will help you perform at your very best, with much less tension.

Be Realistic

It is important to be realistic in developing your new self-concept, especially at the beginning. When I first learned about the power of the self-concept and how my self-concept controlled my income, I was earning about $30,000 a year. I immediately set a goal to earn $300,000 a year. But instead of this big goal motivating me, it actually served as a demotivator. As opposed to my mind going to work to find a way to earn that kind of money, my mind shut down, like turning off a light switch.

What I learned later was that a goal that is vastly beyond anything you have ever accomplished before is ignored by your self-concept. Instead of motivating you, it discourages you. After six months of working toward this new, unrealistic goal, I finally realized my mistake and reset my goal for $50,000 per year. Almost immediately, I began making progress and had soon achieved my new goal.

Your Income Level Locks In

Here is another interesting point. A salesperson may start off at the bottom and work his way up over a period of several years, eventually earning more than $100,000 a year. But then the economy goes south, the industry retracts or shuts down, and he has to start over with a different company selling a different product. How much do you think he earns in the following year? Answer: more than $100,000.

Why is this? Because he already has a self-concept as a $100,000-a-year salesperson; no matter what happens on the outside, he will always find a way to earn $100,000 or more.

You’ve read stories of senior executives with large corporations who are earning more than a million dollars a year. For some reason, they lose their jobs. Then, a couple of months later, you read or hear about them and learn that they are working for another company and still earning more than a million dollars a year. The fact is, once a person is a million-dollar-a-year person, no one would think of offering him or her less. It is all a matter of self-concept.

The Key Result Areas of Selling

In selling, there are seven key result areas, or KRAs. These KRAs are like the digits in a telephone number. You must dial each of them in sequence if you want to get through and make a sale. Your performance and effectiveness in each of these key result areas determine your overall success and the height of your income.

These seven key result areas are prospecting, building rapport, identifying needs, presenting, answering objections, closing the sale, and getting resales and referrals. Your self-concept in each of these seven areas determines your performance in these areas, as well as your overall income level.

Fortunately, everyone who is good in any one of these areas was once poor at it. Every professional in the top 10 percent started in the bottom 10 percent. The good news is that, if you can drive a car or operate a cell phone, you can become excellent in each of these seven critical skills. It is simply a matter of learning and practice.

If you have a poor self-concept with regard to any particular sales activity, you will avoid that activity whenever possible. But the only reason that you fear taking action in a particular skill area is because you are not good at it—yet. You have not yet mastered the skill. If you are not good at something, you will make mistakes. You will feel awkward, angry and frustrated. It would be normal and natural for you to avoid that activity.

Master the Skill

The solution for your fears or reluctance in any key skill area in selling is for you to master that skill. Fortunately, there are more books, audiotapes, courses, and bits of advice available to you now to help you master each skill than you could consume in a lifetime. There is absolutely no reason for you to be held back from joining the top 10 percent simply because you are weak in a particular skill area.

You can learn how to prospect effectively. You can be taught how to build high levels of rapport and trust with prospects. You can become skilled at how to ask questions and listen carefully to the answers. You can develop calmness and confidence in your interactions with others. You can learn anything you need to learn through practice and repetition.

It is the same with each skill area. You can become an expert at accurately identifying the needs of the person you are talking to, and qualifying the prospect, by asking more and better questions.

You can become excellent in your sales presentation, growing so effective that people are tearing the product out of your hands even before you finish talking.

You can learn how to answer the prospect’s objections and concerns, responding so satisfactorily that the objections disappear and never come up again. You can learn the various methods included in this book for asking for the order and closing the sale at the appropriate time.

Finally, you can learn how to create a “golden chain” of referrals from prospects and customers and how to sell more and more to people who have bought from you already. These are all learnable skills.

Get Better at What You Do

The better you get in any area, the more positive your self-concept becomes in that area. The more confidence you have in your ability, the happier you feel when you are doing that part of your job, and the better results you will get. You can, in fact, like a sculptor, shape the entire quality of your sales personality.

You never feel uneasy doing something that you are good at. You only feel anxious doing something that you think you are not particularly good at. Every single step that you take to improve in any area raises your self-confidence and increases your likelihood of success each time you try it.

Face Your Fears

When you start selling for the first time, your heart is usually in your throat. It is pounding so loudly that you think people around you can hear it. Your stomach is often churning when you go into your first sales call. Psychologists say that you often act as if you were a child in fear of getting a spanking.

Your self-concept is largely subjective. It is not based on reality. It is based solely on the ideas or thoughts that you have about yourself, especially the self-limiting opinions that hold most people back.

Fear and self-doubt have always been the greatest enemies of human potential. Many people doubt their ability to excel in a particular area, and even though it is not true, it becomes true. As William James of Harvard said, “Belief creates the actual fact.” If you believe that you are limited in some way, you will feel and act as if you are limited, and it will become true for you.

Fear and self-doubt have always been the greatest enemies of human potential.
Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Some people feel that they are terrible at closing sales. As long as you think that and say it to yourself, then you will be terrible at closing sales. The very idea of asking for the order will cause your heart to pound, your stomach to churn, your palms to sweat, and your mind to go blank. The fact is that closing is a normal and natural end of a sales conversation, as you will learn. Once you have mastered the art of closing sales, you will be able to ask for the order under any circumstances.

Some people are convinced that they are terrible on the phone. Because of the common fear of rejection, they avoid calling people who may not be friendly and welcoming. They then say to themselves, “I hate calling strangers.”

As long as you think and say this to yourself, every time you pick up the phone, you are going to stumble over your words. You will make mistakes and perform poorly.

Challenge Your Self-Limiting Beliefs

The good news is that your self-limiting beliefs are usually based on erroneous information. They are not based on fact or reality. They are very often illusions in your own mind. Because they are unreal, you can get rid of them by replacing them with new, positive beliefs of confidence and competence in any area.

Self-limiting beliefs develop early and easily. Sometimes you will try something, like skiing or skating, and do it poorly the first time. You will immediately conclude that you are no good at that sport. From then on, you will sabotage yourself by seeking out examples to validate your initial decision. Soon you will avoid that area of activity altogether.

Louise Hay, the teacher and metaphysical writer, says that the core problem that each person has is the feeling of “I’m not good enough.” We all have the feeling, deep down inside, that we are not as good as other folks. We feel that people who are doing better than us are actually better than us. If they are better than us, we unconsciously conclude, we must be worse than they are. If they are worth more, then we must be worth less. This false conclusion is the fundamental cause of most unhappiness in our society.

The Reactor Core of Your Self-Concept

The most important discovery of all in self-concept psychology is the central role of your self-esteem. Your self-esteem is best defined as “how much you like yourself.” How much you like yourself is the critical determining factor of your personality and of everything that happens to you.

The degree to which you like yourself in any area is the key determinant of your performance and effectiveness in that area. It determines how much money you make, how you dress, how well you get along with other people, how much you sell, and the quality of your life.

A person who really likes himself or herself has high self-esteem and therefore a positive self-concept. When you really like yourself in a particular role, you perform at your best in that role.

The more you like yourself, the more you like other people. The more you like other people, the more they like you in return. The more you like your customers, the more your customers like you, and the more willing they are to buy from you and to recommend you to their friends.

High-self-esteem people meet and marry other high-self-esteem people. High-self-esteem parents raise high-self-esteem children. High-self- esteem bosses build high-self-esteem salespeople and employees. High-self-esteem men and women set higher standards for themselves and practice higher levels of self-discipline. They have better friendships and get along better with the people they meet. They are generally happier and more fulfilled than people who don’t like themselves very much.

Self-Esteem and Sales Performance

The more you like yourself in prospecting, building rapport, identifying needs, presenting your product or service, answering objections, closing the sale, and getting resales and referrals, the better you will be in each of these areas.

A person who doesn’t like himself or feels badly about himself in a particular area performs poorly in that area. Low-self-esteem salespeople who don’t like themselves, don’t like other people very much either. As a result, they have a hard time building high-quality relationships with customers. For some reason, customers don’t particularly like or trust them and prefer to buy from someone else.

How much you like yourself is the key determinant of your success in sales and of your income. As a matter of fact, it determines how successful you are in every part of your life.

The Great Discovery

Because of the power of your mind in determining your life and destiny, one of the greatest discoveries in history is that you become what you think about most of the time.

Happy people think happy thoughts. Successful people think successful thoughts. Loving people think loving thoughts. Wealthy people think wealthy thoughts. They become what they think about most of the time.

In addition, you become what you say to yourself most of the time. Successful people control their inner dialogues. They talk to themselves positively and confidently as they go through their days. Perhaps the most powerful words you can say to yourself to build your self-esteem are “I like myself!”

Successful people control their inner dialogues.
Each time you say, “I like myself !” your self-esteem goes up. When you repeat the words “I like myself !” over and over throughout the day, you actually cause a chemical change in your brain. You release endorphins that give you a general feeling of confidence and well-being. The more you say, “I like myself !” the more confident you feel and the more competently you perform.

Be Your Own Cheerleader

When I learned this affirmation many years ago, I used to repeat it to myself ten, twenty, and even fifty times per day. I would say it in the morning and in the evening. I would say it as I drove along and before every sales presentation. I would keep repeating it until I drove the message deep into my subconscious mind, where it “locked in” and took on a power of its own. You can do the same thing.

Every time you say, “I like myself !” your overall self-concept improves. Your ability to perform and your level of effectiveness increase immediately. You do everything, including selling, better when you have a high level of self-generated self-esteem.

The Best Time to Make a Sale

Here’s a question for you: When is the best time to make a sale? Answer: right after making a sale. Why? Right after you make a sale, your self-esteem soars. You feel terrific about yourself as a salesperson. You like yourself more. You feel like a winner. When you walk in to speak to the next prospect, feeling terrific about yourself, you will perform at your very best. There will be something about you that has a powerful effect on the customer. Your positive attitude and confident bearing will trigger a desire, at a subconscious level, to buy from you.

Sometimes a salesperson will make a sale first thing in the morning, and then another, and then another and another and another, and sell more in a single day than he or she might have sold in a week or two. This spike in sales performance has nothing to do with the product, the market, or the customer. It happens because the seller’s self-concept has gone up like the mercury in a thermometer on a hot day. As a result, he or she is performing at an exceptional level of effectiveness.

Perform at Your Best

Immediately after you have made a sale, you like yourself more as a salesperson. You feel more confident, competent, and effective in selling. If you have been working on a difficult prospect and you have just closed a sale, get in your car and drive straight over to that tough customer and attempt to make the sale. You will be amazed at how many times this turns out to be an effective strategy. You will be more persuasive right after having made a sale than at any other time.

It will not be the customer who has changed. It won’t be the product or service, or the price, the market, or the competition. The only thing that has changed is you.

Nothing Will Stop You

One of the things we know in sales is that “success breeds success.” The more you sell, the better you become at selling. Your self-concept as a salesperson gets better and better. You finally reach the point in your own thinking where you know that nothing can stop you. If you continue to sell long enough, you will begin to have repeated success experiences. As you sell more and more, your self-concept improves to the point at which you become convinced that you are an excellent salesperson, and that you can make a great living in sales wherever you go.

When you are feeling terrific about yourself, when you really like yourself, you know that you can do well in anything that you put your hand to. When you are selling well, your family and interpersonal relationships seem to be much better. You need less sleep. You have more energy. You have more enthusiasm. You feel more positive about yourself.

The Power of Positive Affirmations

The key to reaching this state of mind is to prepare yourself psychologically before every sales call. Stop and take a couple of seconds; then say to yourself, “I like myself ! I like myself ! I like myself !”

Talking to yourself positively is like pumping yourself up. Just like pumping up a tire, you pump up your self-esteem. First thing in the morning when you get out of bed, start talking to yourself by saying, “I like myself, and I love my work! I like myself, and I love my work!”

Whatever you say to yourself with feeling is accepted by your subconscious as an instruction, a command. Your subconscious mind will then give you the words, actions, and feelings consistent with the message that you have sent to it.

Before going in to see a prospect, say to yourself, “I am a great salesperson, and this is going to be a great call!” Repeat that several times. Get yourself psychologically prepared for a good experience.

When you then walk in to see the prospect, your subconscious will give you the words, the feelings, and the body language consistent with a person who is excellent at what he does. Talking to yourself positively makes you more confident. It causes you to relax and perform better. Your level of self-confidence and calmness has a strong impact on the person you are talking to. Positive self-talk leads to positive sales results.

Obstacles to Sales Success

There are two major obstacles to making and closing any sale. They are both mental. They are the fear of failure and the fear of rejection.

The fear of failure is the biggest single reason for failure in adult life. It is not failure itself, but the fear of failure, the prospect of failure, the anticipation of failure, that causes you to freeze up and perform at a lower level.

The fear of failure is a deep subconscious fear that we all develop early in life, usually as the result of destructive criticism from one or both parents when we are children. If your parents criticized you continually when you were growing up, you will experience this deeply entrenched, unconscious fear of failure as an adult, at least until you learn to get rid of it.

Why Customers Don’t Buy

The fear of failure in the mind of the customer or the prospect is the one greatest obstacle to buying. Every customer has made countless buying mistakes. He has purchased services that he later found were overpriced. He has bought products that broke down and that he could not get repaired. He has been sold things that he did not want, could not use, and could not afford. He has been burned so many times in sales experiences that he is like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

This fear of failure and disappointment is the number one reason why customers do not buy. So, one of the most important things you can do in the process of building trust and credibility is to reduce the customer’s fear to the point where he has no hesitation about going ahead with your offer.

The Fear of Rejection

The second major obstacle to selling and closing is the fear of rejection. This is the fear that the potential buyer might say no. The fear of rejection is triggered by the possibility of rudeness, disapproval, or criticism toward the salesperson by the prospect.

The rule is that 80 percent of sales calls will end in a no, for a thousand different reasons. This does not necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with the salesperson or the product or service being sold. People say no because they simply do not need it, do not want it, cannot use it, cannot afford it, or some other reason.

If you are in sales and you fear rejection, you’ve picked the wrong way to make a living.
If you are in sales and you fear rejection, you’ve picked the wrong way to make a living. The fact is that you are going to get a lot of rejections. As they say, “It goes with the territory.” Every experience of failure or rejection affects your self-esteem. It hurts your self-image. It makes you feel bad about yourself and triggers your worst fear: “I’m not good enough.”

If it were not for the fear of rejection, we would all be terrific salespeople. We would all make twice as much, and maybe even five or ten times as much.

The Salesperson’s Average Day

In a study at Columbia University a few years ago, they found that the average salesperson works approximately one and a half hours per day. They also found that, on the average, the first sales call is not made before eleven o’clock in the morning. The final sales call is usually made at about three thirty in the afternoon, and the average salesperson quits working shortly after that. He goes back to the office or heads for home.

Most people spend half the morning getting warmed up, drinking coffee, chatting with coworkers, reading the paper, shuffling their business cards, and surfing the Internet. Then they go out and make a sales call just in time for lunch. The second sales call isn’t made until about 1:00 or 2:00 PM, after which the average salesperson begins winding down for the day. The total amount of time spent face-to-face with customers works out to about ninety minutes per day. That is the average—half are above; half are below that average.

The Brake on Sales Performance

Why is it that salespeople work so little and avoid getting face-to-face with customers so much? Simple: fear of rejection. The fear of rejection acts like a subconscious “brake” that holds people back and causes them to underperform. Of course, they always have a wonderful selection of excuses and rationalizations, but the real reason is fear of rejection.

It is easy to prove this. Let us conduct an experiment. Imagine that your company has hired a marketing research firm to find customers for you. This firm has developed a sophisticated way of identifying ideal prospects. Using this system, they can give you a computer printout of fifty prospects that will be literally guaranteed, with 90 percent accuracy, to buy on a particular day. This list of hot, qualified prospects is so precise that it is only valid for twenty-four hours. Imagine that they call you in and give you this list of fifty top prospects for the following day.

If you received a list of fifty highly qualified prospects, 90 percent of whom were guaranteed to buy if you could call on them within that one-day period, what time would you start in the morning? How much time would you take for coffee breaks or lunch during the day? How long would you spend chatting with your colleagues and reading the newspaper? If you were guaranteed a sale to virtually every single person you spoke to in a one-day period, you would probably start at the crack of dawn and keep on going until midnight if you possibly could. If you had no fear of rejection and you were guaranteed a high level of success, you would be calling on prospects every single waking moment.

Rejection Is Not Personal

All top salespeople have reached the point where they no longer fear rejection. They have built their self-esteem and self-concepts up such that if someone says no to them, it does not hurt them or put them off. It does not send them dejected back to their offices or cars.

Here’s the key to dealing with rejection. You must realize that rejection is not personal. It is not aimed at you. Rejection has nothing to do with you. Instead, it is like the rain or the sunshine. It just happens from day to day. When you can rise above yourself, stop taking yourself so seriously, and recognize that rejection simply goes with the territory, it will have no more fear for you. You will ignore it like water off a duck’s back. You will expect it in the normal course of things, shrug your shoulders, and move on to the next prospect.

There is a sales motto: “Some will; some won’t; so what? Next!” This should be your motto as well.

Never Give Up

Perhaps the two most fundamental qualities for success in sales are boldness and persistence. It takes courage to get up each day and constantly face the fears of failure and rejection. It takes persistence to keep coming back, day after day, in spite of continued difficulties and disappointment.

But the good news is that courage is a habit. Like a muscle, the more you practice courage, the stronger you become. Eventually, you reach the point at which you are virtually unafraid. After that, your career takes off like a rocket.

Five Calls or Closes

A full 80 percent of sales are never closed before the fifth meeting or closing attempt. It is after the fifth time that you ask the prospect to make a buying decision that you make most of your sales.

These numbers turn out to be valid especially when you are trying to get your prospect to change from buying from one company to buying from your company. At least eight out of ten of all first purchases from a new supplier take place after the fifth call or visit.

It seems that only about 10 percent of salespeople make more than five calls or attempts to close the sale. Half of all salespeople, or more, make only one call before they give up. When you are selling to a company that you want to switch from their existing supplier to you, remember that it usually takes about five visits to break down the prospect’s natural skepticism and resistance.

This does not mean that you have to spend five hours. It just means that you have to make five visits or more. You have to make an appointment, go and see the prospect, talk to him, tell him that you and your company are available to serve him. It is usually after the fifth visit that the prospect starts to become interested.

Most People Quit Early

In a recent study, it was discovered that 48 percent of all sales calls end without the salesperson trying to close even once. The salesperson meets with the prospect, talks enthusiastically about his product or service, shows him the written information, and dazzles him with reasons to buy. Then, when the prospect has been completely overwhelmed with his charm, enthusiasm, and verbal agility, he takes a deep breath, sits back, and says, “Well, what do you think?”

This almost automatically triggers the response, “Well, I’d like to think it over.” The prospect says he wants to talk it over with his boss, wife, cousin, brother, uncle, sister, partner, board of directors, banker, accountant, and whoever else he can think of. “Could you call me back later?”

Prospects Don’t Think It Over

One of the important secrets of success in sales is for you to understand and accept that people don’t “think it over.” The minute you walk out of the prospect’s office or home, he or she forgets that you ever lived.

Have you ever gone back to see a prospect a week later, after you thought you had a fantastic sales conversation and he was thinking it over? Some salespeople have the vanity to believe that this prospect has gone home and has been thinking about their product or service twenty-four hours a day. They think he turns it over in his mind and talks about it with everyone he meets. He thinks about it and dreams about it, just waiting for you to come back.

Then, when you visit the prospect a week or two later, you are amazed to find that he has forgotten your name, your product, and everything else. He doesn’t remember who you are or what you sell. He has not been thinking about you or your product or service at all.

People don’t think things over with regard to products or sales. These words are a polite way of saying, “Good-bye forever.” When they say to you, “Let me think it over,” they are announcing to you that the interview is over and that you have lost your entire investment of time and energy in this prospect.

Self-Esteem Eliminates Fear

The reason I mention this direct relationship between courage and persistence on the one hand, and making multiple calls and sales success on the other, is this: there is a direct and inverse relationship between the fears of rejection and failure, and high self-esteem. The more you like yourself, the less you feel rejection and the less you fear failure.

Imagine two escalators that go in different directions. One is the up escalator to high self-esteem, and the other is the down escalator to the fears of failure and rejection that hold you back. The more you like yourself and the higher your self-esteem, the faster you go up the escalator to courage and confidence. The more you think about failure or rejection, the more you ride the down escalator toward fears of failure and rejection.

You Are a Good Person

When a person says no to you, he is not saying no to you as a person. He is simply saying no to your offering or your presentation or your prices. The rejection is not personal. Once you know and understand that saying no is not personal, you stop worrying about it when people react to you or your product negatively.

Here’s the danger: if you take a “no” personally, you can start to think there is something wrong with you as an individual. Or you begin to believe that your product or your company is faulty. When you begin thinking like this, you can soon become discouraged. You will lose your enthusiasm for selling. As a result, you will start cutting back on prospecting. Soon you will only be working an hour and a half per day.

Fear Leads to Excuses for Not Selling

As your fears increase, you will begin to rationalize and justify your nonselling behavior. You will make excuses and create all kinds of “make-work” at the office. You will convince yourself that you have to read the newspaper so that you will be fully informed when you call on prospects. You have to shuffle your business cards and check the office to see if there have been any phone calls. You have all those people out there who are “thinking it over.” Maybe one of them has called and ordered something.

You go into the office and plan your first hour or two around a couple of cups of coffee. After all, you have to wake yourself up in the morning so that you are sharp and alert when you go out to see customers. You chat with your coworkers and talk about business, especially how tough the business is. You kill most of the morning; then you realize that you had better go out and call on somebody, anybody. So you rush out and make a call just before it’s time for lunch.

An Unproductive Day

You wouldn’t want to interrupt prospects when they are going for lunch. Therefore, you don’t make any calls after 11:30 AM. You go and have lunch with your friends, go shopping, get your car washed, or kill time.

Time passes. You certainly don’t want to call on people immediately after they get back from lunch. It might disturb their digestion. So you make up a few more excuses and rationalizations, and you don’t make your next call until 2:00 or 3:00 PM. Soon it’s 3:30, then 4:00, and of course, everybody’s on their way home, aren’t they?

You don’t want to go out and bother people late in the afternoon while they are preparing to wrap up for the day. Instead, you go back to the office to commiserate with the other salespeople who are gathering there like survivors after an accident and talk about what a tough day you’ve had.

There is the story of the two salesmen who go back to the office at the end of the day. One says, “Boy, did I ever have a lot of good interviews today!”

The other one says, “Yeah, I didn’t sell anything either.”

Can you identify with any of these behaviors? They are the favorite practices and excuses of salespeople in the bottom 20 percent of money earners in their fields.

Increase Traveling Time

Another way that salespeople avoid the possibility of failure and rejection is by spreading out their sales calls geographically. Such a salesperson makes one call at one end of town and makes her second call in the afternoon at the other end of town. This gives her a nice solid hour of driving in between, which allows her to pretend that she is working, when in reality, she is just putting off getting face-to-face with a prospect.

The fears of failure and rejection, which lower your self-esteem, quickly become the major obstacles to success in sales.

Build Your Self-Esteem, Increase Your Income

Everything you do to raise your own self-esteem, including positive self-talk, affirmative visualization, personal motivation, enthusiasm, and individual training improves your personality and increases your effectiveness in selling.

As we said before, there is a direct relationship between your self-esteem and how much money you earn. The more you like yourself, the more sales you make and the higher your income will be. When you organize your life so that you become a perpetual self-esteem-generating person, that alone will contribute more to your income than any other factor.

The Friendship Factor

Customers today are spoiled. They are demanding. They are disloyal. They insist on being treated extremely well before they buy anything. More than anything else, customers will only buy from people they like. We call this the “friendship factor.”

The friendship factor in selling simply says that a prospect will not buy from you until he is genuinely convinced that you are his friend and that you are acting in his best interests.

For this reason, the first thing you do in a sales interview is create a bond, make a friend. Sales expert Heinz Goldman once wrote a book with a title that summarized this process perfectly: How to Win Customers. Your job as a sales professional is to win people over to your side by making it clear that you care about them and want the best for them.

Build a Bridge

You can only begin selling after you have convinced the prospect that you are his pal and that you want what is best for him. In fact, if you begin talking about your product or service before you have built a bridge of friendship to your prospect, the customer will lose all interest in buying from you. If you don’t genuinely care about the customer, why should the customer care about you or what you are offering?

Healthy Personality

An excellent definition of a healthy personality is this: “Your personality is healthy to the degree to which you can get along with the greatest number of different types of people.” You have an unhealthy or problem personality to the degree to which you cannot get along with most other people. People at the highest level of healthy personality have developed the ability to get along with the greatest variety of different people, especially in selling. The point is, the level of your self-esteem corresponds directly with the health of your personality. Again, the more you like yourself, the more you enjoy others and the more they like you. The more you like yourself, the easier it is for you to get along with a great variety of people.

Making Friends

The individual with high self-esteem is the one who has the greatest facility for making friends wherever he goes. Because he likes himself, he is naturally and spontaneously fond of others. When people feel that someone genuinely likes them, they are more open to listening to that person and to buying what he is selling.

When people feel that someone genuinely likes them, they are more open to listening to that person and to buying what he is selling.
Have you ever had an experience where you wanted to buy a product or service, but you didn’t like the salesperson? In most cases you will walk away, even if the product and the price are ideal.

Think of your very best customers today. The people you enjoy selling to and the people who enjoy buying from you are invariably the people that you like the most and who like you in return.

Your Self-Esteem Determines Your Income

Everything you do to improve your level of self-esteem increases and enhances the quality of your relationships with your customers. Self-esteem building actions trigger the “friendship factor” and make you a more successful salesperson. Your level of self-esteem in selling determines the amount of money that you earn. The very best salespeople have a natural capacity to make friends easily with prospective customers.

Unfortunately, everything that happens to lower your self-esteem will lower your sales effectiveness as well. If you are tired or unwell for any reason, your effectiveness will decrease. If you have arguments with your boss or your spouse, this will lower your self-esteem, sometimes to the point at which you can’t sell anything at all.

The Catalyst for Sales Success

The primary emotion in sales success is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm accounts for 50 percent or more of all sales ability. One of the very best definitions of a sale is “a transfer of enthusiasm.”

When you transfer your enthusiasm for your product or service into the mind and heart of your prospect, like an electrical connection, the sale takes place. When your emotional commitment and belief in the goodness of what you are selling transfers into the mind of the prospect or customer, all hesitation to buy disappears.

Once again, there is a direct link between how much you like yourself, your self-esteem, and your level of enthusiasm. The more you like yourself, the more enthusiastic you are. The more enthusiastic you are about your company and your product, the more enthusiastic the customer will become. Anything you do to raise your self-esteem will increase your ability to sell.

Emotions Are Contagious

In the inner game of selling, it is essential that you understand that emotions are contagious. Each person is affected by the emotions of other people. When you are positive, confident, and enthusiastic about your goods or service, the prospect picks up these emotions from you and becomes positive and enthusiastic as well.

Here’s the key: You cannot give away something that you don’t already have. You cannot convey enthusiasm if you don’t have it yourself. This is why top salespeople love their merchandise or service and love the field of selling. Their enthusiasm is heartfelt and genuine. Prospects pick it up at an unconscious level and want to participate in whatever is making them feel so good about themselves and their work. Because of their confidence and passion, prospects want to buy from them and recommend them to their friends.

Failure Is Not an Option

It is critical that you back your sales efforts with willpower and determination. Decide now that you will not give up.

When you resolve in advance that you will never give up, you will be mentally prepared to bounce back from failure and rejection. When you continue to persist, no matter how difficult the situation, you will eventually succeed. You will ultimately make sales. You will finally win customers.

Whenever you make a sale, you feel like a “winner.” Each time you close, your self-esteem goes up and your self-concept improves. Your self-image is reinforced.

The more you like yourself, the better you will do in sales, and in every other part of your life. Your ability to perform and your level of effectiveness increase in your nonbusiness activities.

The reason so many people fail in sales is simply because they do not persist long enough and work hard enough to get those first few winning experiences. Once you begin to make sales and feel like a winner, you become even more motivated to sell even more of your product or service. But if you don’t have those first successful experiences, you can easily lose heart and begin thinking that selling is not for you.

Practice Mental Rehearsal

Mental rehearsal is vital. The more you preprogram yourself to bounce back, the easier it is for you to overcome the failures and rejections that are part of the selling life. Talk to yourself positively. Say things like “I can do it! I can do it! I can do it!” whenever you feel fears of failure or rejection.

Interestingly enough, when you make the decision that no matter what happens, you will never give up, your self-esteem increases immediately. You respect yourself more. Your self-confidence skyrockets. Even though you have not yet stepped out of your office, the very act of making the decision that you are going to succeed, that you can do it, that you will never quit, no matter what, improves your “reputation” with yourself. You see yourself in a more positive light. You feel more like a winner. You are more composed and self-assured. You become more capable of dealing with the ups and downs of daily selling life. The very act of resolving to persist until you succeed changes your personality and makes you a stronger and more powerful person.