Why you’ve lost your confidence

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“Confidence comes from competence,” Dan Lok.

When you’ve lost your confidence it’s because you either:

🔥Lack awareness

🔥 You lack competence

Competence is a collection of your S.K.E.s

Skills

Knowledge

Experience

If you KNOW you have the skills, knowledge, & experience- I mean you’re banging away at your SKE’s daily, then you lack awareness.

You lack awareness because you’re waiting on customers to remind you of your confidence (I.e. Making a sale), but if you’re only successfully making a sale 40% of the time, you’re not gonna be reminded very often.

Even if you’re not in sales, you lack awareness because you’re putting all your stock in a specific outcome, decision, or result & when you don’t get it, you doubt yourself.

You may also lack confidence because you’re deficient in 1, 2, or all of what makes up competence.

You lack Skills: That’s your ability amplified daily. Professional athletes are all talented, but they’re maniacal about developing better skills.

You lack Knowledge: Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what your talking about? Do you know your product?

You lack Experience: CURRENT EXPERIENCE. Don’t give me that, “I was in HR for 37.237 years…I’ve been going this for 20 yrs & 11 months (with a neck roll). Do you have current experience- meaning, even if you are not winning right now, are you still getting out there and working to make it happen?

If you’ve lost your confidence you either lack the awareness or you lack the competence. In either case fix it.

Stay in The Sales Life 💪

Trust…but verify

In #sales, confidence is everything…

But what about when you lose your confidence?

You put your confidence in the wrong thing…

You put your confidence in the customer or a specific outcome & when they bought elsewhere you got pissed off…which leads to less effort…which leads to eventually quitting.

“Buyers are liars…” right?

Nope…buyers aren’t liars…

They’re just not telling you everything…

Trust but verify…

Business owners hire independent auditors to verify what the business’ accountant is saying…

The IRS trusts your returns…

…but they will verify.

You lose your confidence- thinking “they’re all liars” because you trusted they were:

…6 months out

…wanted to shop around

…couldn’t get approved

Only to discover they bought somewhere else.

Trust…but verify.

Your body language & tone tell your customers you trust what they’re saying…

But your questions verify if it’s a stall or real objection.

It’s not that you don’t trust them…you just need to verify.

~Stay in The Sales 💪ife

Stop Stopping

Most people initially struggle in sales because they’ve been taking orders their whole life.

When you were young, you did what your parents told you to do. Sure, you may have bucked up a time or hundred, but immediately you’d back down from rebelling once they slapped you back with one of those,

“When you have your own damn place and pay your own damn bills, then you can do whatever the hell you want to do…but until then, you better do what the hell I tell you to do!” 

We grow older, but in some ways, we never age emotionally-I mean we pop bottles on monumental birthdays, but we stall out in a fixed wage mindset. Our employer tells us, “Do that and I’ll pay you this,” which traditionally is par for the course, but when you get into the sales, you’ve got to take that decade or more of being an “order taker-” of being told what to do and you’ve got to flip it on its head.

If you were working in fast food as a salesperson,  it’d be as if someone came in and placed an order, and then you turned right back around and challenged that same order.

(Customer): “Yea I’d like a large #6 with a Coke.”

(You, the fast food salesperson): “You know a small cheeseburger with a water would be calorically better.”

You couldn’t do that working at Slap Beef Burger– hell you wouldn’t be there long if you did. You can’t challenge when it comes to taking orders, but you do have to push back when it comes to working in sales.

Selling effectively is about challenging the thoughts of your customers.

Statistically speaking most of your customers are going to buy something different than when they first started looking. Keeping that thought in mind, it’s not that you ignore them or tell them defiantly, “You don’t need that…this is what you need;” it’s more so leaning into their logic with suggestions and notice the patterns that begin to emerge when you ask Past, Present, and Future questions.

What did they like before? What do they wish they had now as opposed to then? Why is your customer in the market in the first place and how will your product fit their needs?

Based on your customers’ answers, you then begin to steer the sale, by adjusting your sails. As the conditions of your customers’ answers improve or deteriorate, you adjust your sails towards the winds of budgetary concerns, options, equity, or the fact that they’ve got a funky attitude thanks to their last 4 sales experiences.

It seems challenging at first-you will get better, but first, you’ve got to stop stopping.

When a customer “places an order-” when they make a statement or voice an objection don’t just pull up short and react, clarify and challenge their thoughts, objections, fears and concerns instead. What do they really mean? Where are they going with this? What’s the intent behind their words? Anticipate and adjust accordingly. Think to yourself, how can I give their ideas fresh legs with a new perspective?

Of course when you’re new, your mind is going to screeeeam at you to stop. This is all new to you-you fearfully get the answers but you’ll never knowledgeably amass the answers nor gain experience if you keep on stopping at the points where you get stuck.

Stop stopping…

Oh…but you thought this post was only about those people in sales?

No, I’m talking to you too.

You may not work in sales, but you sure as hell live in sales. Sales isn’t just a profession, it’s a life skill and you need to stop stopping. You may not have to fill an order, but you do have to fulfill a calling. What’s life calling you to do? What’s that pull…what’s that whisper..what’s that yearn?

Through circumstances and events-some beyond your control, life tries to place an order on your life and I’m telling you that you don’t have to fill that order. Your past is ordering that you aren’t good enough. Your upbringing is ordering that you’ll never get off of assistance. The notice you received; the word you just got, the month that you’re having right now is ordering that you’ll never make it out-that you’ll never move up and that you’ll never get ahead. What you’ve got, where you came from, or what you’re going through, is not a calling, it’s an order. Life’s pulling at you to lift your eyes above your thoughts and present circumstances and stop stopping.

Fu*k that order…take today’s apron off and throw it on the counter and say, “No…you can’t take my order, but you can sure as shit take mine.”  Stop taking orders and begin placing them. Fear left un-pushed, will make you wait for your orders…but fear acted upon, learned from, and put back in motion will make you realize your full potential.

Pull up, place your order, and stop stopping.

Catch the 300+ episodes of The Sales Life w/ Marsh Buice podcast. Find it on iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

 

 

2 Kinds of Confidence

When we think of confidence, we tend to think of it in one big bulk item, but confidence comes in different forms-there’s Perceived Confidence and then there’s Earned Confidence. Perceived confidence is other people’s take on you. People size you up based on how you carry yourself..your swag, your dress, the way that you walk, the confidence that you radiate- from the way that you stand to the assertiveness in your voice, people literally buy the confidence that you are selling. And you must maintain a high perceived confidence no matter what kind of hell you may be going through because what you’re going through is not a definition of who you are, it’s only an indication of where you are and the start toward the way out, is through perceived confidence. People don’t want to hear the Whoa is me stories…you got shit going on in your life, but so do others, and they only want to do business with people who at least look like they have their shit together. It’s crazy how we let Life’s events shape our confidence. One minute there’s nothing that could stop us…and 60 seconds later, we don’t know if we can even make it to the next day. People don’t know the hell you got going on behind those eyes-they have no clue, so why include them in something they don’t have the answer? Only you have the solution and it starts with first believing in yourself.

But if this were a confidence test (and it is), you’d fail because perceived confidence is only 50%.

Earned confidence is the other half needed and it is accumulated through experiences....alllll experiences. I’m not just talking about the cupcakes, rainbows, and unicorned moments of your Life…I’m talking about the shit sandwich moments too. It’s a cocktail of all experiences-the flavors of the setbacks, rejections, ridicules, misses, and embarrassments, stirred in with all of the best month ever, records broken, in the land of milk and honey moments too. It’s taking every single moment-melding the highs and the lows to learn, recycle, improve, and yes…double down on risk, putting the effort back out there again, and again, and again, (x) infinity. That’s earned confidence-those stripes are merited based on the ability to never be satisfied and never be sat.

In sales you have to have both perceived and earned confidence because if you only had perceived confidence, the minute things blow up..the minute the wheels start to come off (and they will), if all you have is perceived confidence, you’ll melt right there like a snowman in Louisiana heat.

You’ve got to have both…you need to perceive that you are the shit..that you can, will, and must make big things happen. You have to swing as if no man or no thing will ever stand in your way…that no salesperson can hold a match to your level of knowledge and service…dude you have to set that thermostat of perceived confidence to 20 degrees above someone’s comfort level..not overbearing, but they gotta feel you.

Both confidences are dependent on one another. It first starts with how you feel about yourself; customers feel that energy and engage with you; based on your action-the way that you carry yourself, what you know and how you interact, becomes experience….some of it results in a sale, always it results in an education. As you make more sales, your confidence rises…and when you don’t make a sale, your experience increases..as you learn, recycle and put yourself back out there, the odds of success perpetuate.

Confidence…perceived or earned is all based on you. You control it…you influence it…you do it with the way you think, talk, carry, and do.

Customers will pay for your confidence…now you get to set the price.