The Psychology of Successful Selling

Summary:

• Selling is a skill you can develop with the right tools and mindset. Tools like PhoneBurner help improve call quality and contact rates, while psychology-focused techniques can help you overcome internal barriers to success.
• Mindset and skillset both impact sales performance. While training might help you develop your skills, subconscious limiting beliefs can often hold you back. Identifying and altering these beliefs can lead to lasting improvement.
• Limiting beliefs often form in childhood and affect behavior unconsciously. Changing these beliefs requires identifying their roots and replacing them with empowering alternatives.
• Inner conflicts create self-doubt and procrastination. Recognizing and overcoming these conflicts helps you take action, build confidence, and approach sales tasks with purpose.
• Your mindset is key to long-term success. Visualizing a fearless and capable version of yourself helps you transform your approach to sales and achieve your goals.

Not everyone is a “natural” salesperson. You’ve probably seen this for yourself on your team—some members consistently kill it (let’s call them the “A-players”), a few who struggle (the “C-players”), and a bunch of folks in between (you guessed it: the “B-players”).

Does that mean being able to sell is an innate quality you’re either born with or you aren’t—instead of a skill that you can develop over time? Far from it. In fact, you can become a better salesperson, and it’s simpler than you think.

Some of this has to do with the tools and techniques you use. For example, you can use PhoneBurner to reach up to 4x as many contacts and improve the quality of your sales conversations. But there are also important steps you can (and should) take to improve your attitude and approach.

According to Umar Hameed—the author of IdeaCution, host of the No Limits Selling Podcast, and founder of no less than four different companies—the key comes in the form of some basic psychology. He argues that revisiting your subconscious beliefs about yourself can make all the difference when it comes to unlocking your sales potential.

In this article, we’ll tell you how.

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What’s Holding You Back from Making More Sales?

As we discussed with Umar in our webinar, The Psychology of Successful Selling, salespeople have strengths and weaknesses. It’s natural. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get better.

To illustrate this, think about the different steps in making a sale:

• Getting the appointment
• Making the presentation
• Handling the objection
• Closing the deal
• Going deeper into the account
• Getting referrals

Where is the one spot where you get the most resistance? What’s the one area where you think improvements would make the biggest difference? What’s the problem that you could change your sales career by solving?

It’s different for everyone, but there are pretty much no salespeople who excel at every single one of the steps above. To fix that, they train—or they read books, listen to podcasts, ask for advice from mentors, etc.

There’s lots of great advice out there on how to sell, but it doesn’t always lead to lasting results. Most people will feel inspired after trying one of the strategies above, and some might even make some changes to their approach—but chances are, they’ll be back to their old habits after a few weeks.

The question is: why do so many people struggle to make meaningful changes to their work?

Skillset & Mindset: Two Halves of Sales Success

The sales results you get come from two areas. Your Skillset and your Mindset.

Those A-players we mentioned earlier? According to Umar, they have both. The B-players probably have good skills (since they’ve gone to the same training as the A-players)—but something in their mindset is blocking them from showing up in the same way to approach their work. The C-players are probably coming up short in both areas.

If you’re not an A-player, the problem probably isn’t that you just don’t want it enough. Practically everyone wants to be better, at least on a conscious level. The challenge is that some people have subconscious beliefs or assumptions that hold them back in ways they don’t realize.

Related: Are These Common Limiting Beliefs Hurting Your Sales Numbers?

Where Limiting Beliefs Come From

Our beliefs are at the core of who we are. We all have them—in fact, most of us have a lot of them. According to Hameed, the average person has somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 beliefs that define who they are (and by extension, how they deal with different situations).

The problem is that most of us have collected around 95% of those beliefs by the time we’re seven years old. We usually reabsorb them from the role models we have in our formative years: parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, etc.

When we’re kids, anything said by a person in authority that seems to be believable goes straight into our consciousness. From there, it starts dictating the way we live. It determines our behavior, and our behaviors always determine our results.

So if we’re not getting the results we want, it’s not as easy as changing our behavior—because underneath every behavior that counts, there’s a belief in our unconscious that controls it.

Getting inspired by a presentation or a webinar might be enough to make us change our behavior for a while, but unless we can also change the belief behind it, that change will be temporary. To make changes that last, we have to identify and alter the belief at the root of what we do.

Example

Most sales agents would probably hesitate to keep reaching out to a prospect after the third or fourth call that didn’t get returned. It’s easy to assume that if you’ve unsuccessfully tried someone a few times, they don’t want to hear from you. But is that really the case?

People are busy, and they have all kinds of things competing for their attention. Assuming they’re against you—when in reality, they may simply be stressed out and distracted—means you’ve decided there’s no opportunity here before you’ve actually done your due diligence.

We’ve also seen prospects thank sales agents after a dozen or more contacts, specifically because they kept reaching out and trying to speak with them.

That’s just one example of how competitive the landscape is—and why it’s extra important not to create additional obstacles for yourself on top of the ones that are already out there.

Related: How to Stop Negative Thinking and Make More Sales

How to Change the Beliefs that Hold You Back

See Yourself the Way Others See You

If you had to rate your self-esteem on a scale from 1 to 100, what would you say it is? Most of us would probably put it somewhere between 70 and 85 or so—high enough to feel good about ourselves, but with some room for improvement.

But what if you were to sit down and write out a list of all your accomplishments? Not just the ones from this week or this month, or even this year—but going all the way back to your childhood, when the beliefs you have about yourself first took root?

Imagine you’re actually doing it. Take a deep breath in and let it out slowly. Then imagine that you’re in a room with a desk, a pad of paper, and a pen. Imagine sitting down and starting to write down everything you’ve ever accomplished—from your first finger-paintings as a kid to the projects you did in elementary school, the summer jobs you had when you were in high school, awards or honors you obtained in college, and so on.

Now imagine the room you’re in has a glass wall. And imagine that as you’re writing, your consciousness leaves your body and travels to the other side of that glass wall so that you can see yourself sitting there.

As you’re watching yourself write, think of someone from your life—someone who values you highly or loves you very much. Whoever that is, imagine they’re standing right next to you. And imagine that for just one moment, your consciousness can travel inside that person and see yourself through their loving eyes.

What is it like to see yourself through the eyes of someone who cares about you so deeply? See if you can hear their thoughts. And finally, since you’re there inside your body, let yourself feel the depth of their emotions for you.

Now you have three things you didn’t have before: how they see you, what they think about you, and how deeply they care for you.

Now step out of their body, back through that glass wall, and back to where you’re sitting. When you think about yourself now, what change do you notice?

Being able to experience ourselves the way we’re experienced by others is a powerful and organic experience. If you were following along with the exercise just now, you probably feel a significant and positive change to your self-esteem—a sense of greater confidence and self-worth.

The next time you go to that important meeting and you aren’t feeling the magic, try this exercise again. It’s a simple way to change your mindset by revisiting and strengthening the beliefs that make you who you are.

Finding the Roots of Your Limiting Beliefs

The number one place where most people get stuck is having a limiting belief that stops them from executing.

Many people have a vague feeling that they could be doing better than they are (even if they’re doing very well). It’s sometimes described as feeling like they’ve plateaued—and that try as they might, the next plateau is out of reach for them.

Try thinking of a particular time in your life when you weren’t very happy with how you were doing. In your mind’s eye, go back to that moment—where you were likely alone, and beating yourself up for some perceived failure.

Try to visualize what you saw then as accurately as you can—if you were in the car, picture the dashboard, or the garage around the vehicle. Remember the song that was on the radio. Make it real for yourself.

When you do this, you get to re-experience what you were feeling. And chances are, that feeling is connected to other memories as well. People who do this often find that they’re suddenly transported to different moments in their lives when they formed the beliefs that are currently holding them back.

It could be as simple as a parent at a restaurant telling them not to order steak because they couldn’t afford it, which set up a lasting (and limiting) belief around money and self-worth. But whatever it is, identifying this belief gives you an opportunity to change it.

Identifying Your Inner Conflict

This is the second place where a lot of people get stuck. People often talk with passion and certainty about the things they’re going to accomplish, but then undercut themselves in the next moment.

Most of us have some kind of inner conflict like this. It’s a version of the old “two wolves” metaphor. One side of you wants to go for greatness. The other side is saying “who are you to dare do that?”

This kind of conflict is stressful—and it often stops people from being fully committed to reaching their own potential.

But what happens when you can identify these inner conflicts and unleash the right wolf (so to speak)? Simple. You go into beast mode. You become phenomenal at what you do, and that carries over into more passion and energy for the rest of your life as well.

Try to catch the excuses you make next time you’re talking about your goals or plans. Those are your inner conflicts rising up. They’re often related to your limiting beliefs, and once you know what they are, you can get around them.

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Hotwiring Your Brain for Action

You’ve heard the old joke: how do you get a salesperson to shut up? Simple—just hand them a phone.

We’ve all been there. Making calls and talking to prospects is what we do, but sometimes it feels like the hardest thing to do in the world. We avoid it like the plague.

Why does this procrastination happen? Why is it that sometimes we set out to do something straightforward (like make a phone call) but end up doing anything but?

The internal process that drives this is usually based on some combination of our limiting beliefs and inner conflicts. We see the phone, it sparks some kind of negative feeling in us, and it sends us down a different path to avoid that feeling.

The good news is that we can build new pathways that guide us back to the tasks we’re avoiding. It might look something like this:

• Think about a time in your life when you felt incredibly curious, or where you felt particularly decisive.
• Practice visualizing this moment when you look at the phone from now on.
• Eventually, you’ll build a new pathway that leads you towards those positive, inspiring emotions when you think about making calls, instead of going to a place of fear and doubt.

The Final Frontier in Sales Is Your Mindset

So now it’s your turn. Take a deep breath in, let it out slowly, and imagine that you become fearless. Imagine that you’re able to execute your plans—excel at work, show up for your family, display confidence and authority and expertise for your clients. Imagine that you can use the phone elegantly and effortlessly to make your sales dreams come true.

If all of that was possible for you, and you started doing it today, what would your life look like a year from now? Imagine what you could accomplish, and how many people you could inspire.

You probably see some distance between where you want to be then and where you are now—but know that the distance is not as great as it may feel. In fact, it’s only about eight inches or so: the distance from one side of your head to the other. And that’s because your mindset makes all the difference.

Take charge of your mindset and it will change the way you show up—on sales calls and in every other aspect of your life. Start a free trial of PhoneBurner to see how the features of our industry-leading power dialer can support your sales calls before, during, and after your transformation.