5 Ways to Feel More Confident Selling

For as much as we humans love to share experiences and insights with each other (just checkout Twitter, Facebook, and your local water cooler), why does the thought of ‘selling’ conjure up nightmares for many?

  • Talking about yourself feels uncomfortable.
  • Public speaking opens you up to public criticism.
  • Haggling, it’s just not you.

But, at least you seem to be in control and after, at most, an hour it’s done. So we can handle them.

When we look at selling though, we just can’t see an end so we don’t even want to try. Instead we choose to hide behind tools like social media sites, glossy brochures, and others, hoping that our good work wins the day. At a time in the past this might of been enough to pay the bills, but in this day and age we all need to be at a minimum comfortable selling ourselves.

I know this fear
While I’ve been fortunate enough to have finance and engineering as my base disciplines it did little to develop my sales acumen. I was horrible at it and as a consequence turned away from sales because I didn’t understand selling. I thought it was about being pushy and arrogant. Something that you do to people.

The rub is that if you want to advance in business… heck life, you need to sell and in such a way that they want to help you succeed. So, somehow I had to change my perspective. This led to a voyage of self learning and understanding. What I ultimately discovered is that selling is helping people fill their needs and wants; a mutual win-win activity.

5 keys to becoming comfortable with selling

Focus on selling what you geek out about. The more you know about and love the value derived from your product, the easier it is to identify and convince those who can gain the most from buying it.

Pullback the curtain. Follow (replicate) the leaders. Discover how they overcome their hurdles. Yes, we all still and always will have them.

Control your inner dialogue. The greatest discovery of all time is that you become what you think about all the time. Focus on helping those who can benefit from your solution. The feeling experienced from truly helping someone is powerful.

Commit to lifelong learning. Here are three authors that can provide you with a solid base.

1) Brian Tracy
2) Zig Ziglar
3) Harry Mackay

Resolve to work hard.  This just might be the secret ingredient to most successes. I guess there’s good reason then that we heard it from our parents from day one.

What are you going to commit to doing?

 

Donald McMichacel teaches BE 261 Starting a Small Business.
Follow him on Google+ at +Donald McMichael

 

One thought on “5 Ways to Feel More Confident Selling

  1. Hey. I know the feeling. When I was younger and starting out in commission sales I went through the whole gammit of insecurity, both self and professional. Buyers often recognize this and do take full advantage. Here 30 years later and still in commission sales. You toughen up after a while.

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