Selling Strategies Take Second Place To Feelings In Your Sales Career

Everyone who sells successfully understands the importance of being trained in the art of selling. Strategies, techniques, communication skills, organizational skills and, of course, passion are all vital. However, one area may very well occupy first place when it comes to determining long-term success job satisfaction and career survival. It is the area of our feelings or emotions.

How you handle your thoughts and the resulting initial feelings could determine your success or failure in your selling career. This lesson applies in other areas of life as well.

Whether we like to admit it or not, our thoughts and feelings play a critical role in the selling process. When we experience negative thoughts we end up with negative feelings that will often be the catalyst to generating a multitude of problems.

When we feel good, we have energy and do or create positive outcomes, often very easily. On the other hand, when we feel bad, our energy levels plummet and we do unproductive things or we create negative situations and outcomes. Take a moment and contemplate that concept for a moment.

For example, there are many times during our selling day when things will go differently than the way we planned or hoped they would. I hesitate to describe it as ‘go wrong’. Let’s just say they ‘go differently’. This type of event can get us off our planned course of action.

When these occurrences happen, we will experience a thought and then an initial feeling will develop in response to the occurrence. For most people this will tend to be a negative feeling (which is a really polite way of describing some level of anger), that will drain their energy and ultimately put them on a path of making poor choices or perhaps saying or doing inappropriate things that could cost them the sale.

I am not going to tell you that all you need to do is control your thinking and everything will be wonderful. I’ve been trying all my life to control my thoughts. When things occur in your life, thoughts will come to you. You can’t control that. What you can do is replace them with empowering thoughts. I hope that makes sense to you.

I am not going to advise you to control your initial feelings either. Feelings pass away as new feelings are created to replace them. You can change your feelings by changing what you choose to think about. This means there is no need to fight your feelings. Fighting them will just drain your energy and take focus away from what needs to be done. So what can be done?

Simply, you need to control your actions immediately after the negative feeling takes place. It’s not that hard to do once you become fully aware of how to accomplish it.

When you experience a negative feeling, you have two basic choices. You can be reactive or you can choose to be proactive. Being reactive simply means responding to an external stimulus while being proactive means to control a situation by ‘causing’ something to happen rather than waiting to respond to an event after it happens.

In true life and death situations, reacting very quickly can be necessary for your actual survival. It’s built into our DNA as our ‘fight or flight’ mechanism. But the fact is that true life and death situations are extremely rare in life and even rarer in selling situations. This gives us the luxury of ‘time’ before we must act. We can and must use this available time to our personal advantage.

When I was angered by something as a child, my mother would often advise me to take a deep breath and “count to ten” before saying or doing anything. It was great advice then and it’s powerful advise today.

The deep breath will provide extra oxygen to help fuel your brain and help calm you. Even if you count quickly, you will still get three or four seconds to work with. Your brain can work miracles in those few seconds.

You can use the time to analyze the situation. You can alter your game plan. You can replace the thoughts of anger and disappointment with ones of confident expectation that things will work out which is a positive thought that will allow your energy to be restored.

The key to doing all this in those few seconds is this. Keep judgment and blame for the occurrence out of the process. Judging or blaming won’t serve you. It doesn’t matter if something ‘goes wrong or differently’. What matters is the actions you choose to take.

If something doesn’t work, don’t get sidetracked into reacting, judging and blaming. Pause and use your time to get positive and problem solve. Then take control and take deliberate action to put yourself back on track. That is the ‘PROACTIVE SOLUTION’ that will put you in control of your feelings and your career.

Jim Masson is the author of the sales training book “Getting Paid is Good!! Timeless Essentials of Professional Selling … and more.”

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