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.
I like Daniel Coyle’s book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips For Improving Your Skills-now he also wrote The Talent Code which is a good book about how individuals unlock their talent-a book that we’ll chop up later, but today I want to talk about something I hope that you’re doing every day…and that’s making mistakes-not only making them, but more specifically what you do after you make them. We don’t like to make mistakes-mistakes make us vulnerable to others…it exposes us to being laughed at, talked about, sneered at, pointed to, written up and even fired-and that’s just on the outside. The internal game -what’s going on the inside of us is even worse. When we make a mistakes, we begin to lose our internal mojo-our self-confidence, but self-confidence is a very strange thing: if you try and fail your self-confidence slips a notch…but if you don’t try for fear of failing, that too causes you to lose your self-confidence because you’re not producing- so it becomes one of those damned if you do..damned if you don’t scenarios. So here’s my thing, if you’re going to expose yourself to the possibility of losing your self-confidence either way, then why not lose it in the only direction that you have the possibility to not only gain it back but also inch it forward-and it sure as hell ain’t by sitting around…you’ll gain confidence and skills through making mistakes because as Coyle says in Tip #22, “Mistakes are your guideposts for improvement.” Coyle discovered brain scan studies that revealed that .25 seconds-a quarter of a second after making a mistake we do 1 of 2 things: We either ignore the mistake or we look hard at it…
The Sales Life with Marsh Buice 