Are Self-Limiting Beliefs Constraining You & Your Team?

Allowing self-limiting beliefs to constrain performance will limit sales results. Like everyone, salespeople hold stubbornly to private beliefs about themselves, clients, markets, competition, and the economy. These beliefs can have an enormous impact, positive or negative, on results.

When salespeople don’t see themselves as providing value, they tend to approach customers in ways that appeal to reasons for buying, rather than the genuine business need of the customer.

It’s about your mind-set!

Salespeople who believe that, if they had lower prices, they would win more deals, tend to attract more price objections. This leaves them feeling scared to talk to about what they have to offer. Their downward spiral then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Salespeople’s desire to succeed may be so dominated by a need to be liked, that they’ll avoid asking prospects for information that is needed to identify the prospects’ compelling reasons to buy. When this happens, closing becomes a real issue because fearing rejection, we think that asking for the order might cause a breakdown in the relationship with their prospect. Rather lose an order than a customer…. Right? J

Fear of Calling

Recent studies have confirmed the obvious, that “fear of calling” in sales can contribute to a significant proportion of lost revenues. One study recently found that as many as 40 % of established salespeople experienced periods of “fear of calling” severe enough to threaten their future in sales.

Fixing the “fear of calling” syndrome cannot be addressed by training alone. It requires us to take a hard honest look at our performance and better yet, find an experienced coach or mentor to work with each salesperson’s particular set of beliefs, so that they feel truly empowered to breakthrough their self-created mental barriers. One particular statistic, in the following survey, should give any salesperson suffering from “fear of calling” renewed confidence. Customers don’t like it when we don’t call them often enough!

How Customers Regard Salespeople Survey

  • Salespeople who know nothing about the customer’s business 60%
  • Salespeople who know little about their products and services 60%
  • Salespeople who call too often 9%
  • Salespeople who don’t call often enough 49%
  • Salespeople who do not have the authority to negotiate prices 45%
  • Salespeople who do not ask for the order 40%
  • Salespeople who are not properly or sufficiently organized 55%

(Adapted from Top Sales Magazine April 2017)