01608 644144
Fear Inhibits Salespeople’s Powers Of Persuasion
Marie Curie, the famous physicist, once said: “There is nothing in this world we need fear, if we only understand it!” Fear is the greatest obstacle to success in sales. Many sales people attending sales training courses admit to fear. It prevents your sales people from making visits unexpectedly, makes it difficult to visit prospective customers and robs sales people of their self-confidence during negotiations.
There are four steps you can take to help your sales people conquer their, often underlying, fears:
Gaining self-confidence
Goethe said: “Each individual is a miracle of unknown and unrecognised possibilities”. Achievement primarily depends on whether you believe in it. As a sales manager, you should consequently set young or inexperienced sales people, goals, which they can achieve. Goals, which others have managed to achieve and which are as a result clearly within reach. If a sales person believes they are competent of attaining a certain goal, they are half way there already.
Acquiring product knowledge
Sales people, who are up to date about their product and its uses, naturally enter sales negotiations with self-confidence. They know they are a competent negotiating partner for their customers. When a 23-year-old pharmaceutical sales person visits a doctor, they are not specifically there to sell the doctor something. They should also be able to help the doctor to gain knowledge of better methods of treatment.
Building relationships
All really significant business relationships are based on friendship. It is, however, a completely normal defensive mechanism to at the outset have fear of the unknown. If a sales person is visiting a customer for the first time, their adrenalin automatically increases. If, on the other hand, they are visiting an ‘old friend’, they will be completely relaxed.
Belief in the product
The sales person must be convinced that the world needs this product, before they can comfortably sell it.
Few sales people have such a vision. Most see their work as merely routine and do not want to generate something new with different ideas.
Sales people devoid of ideas accept their working environment as it is, visionary sales people, on the other hand, influence their working environment. Successful sales people consider that their product will be useful to the customer making things easier for them, solving their problems and making them a profit. It is from this ‘confidence’ that the sales department draws the energy and powers of persuasion that are so vital for sales success. Faith is an attribute that is supported and encouraged on sales training courses.
In conjunction with these four fundamental steps, the following tips may help them conquer their fear of customers:
Children who are frightened of mice, rats or spiders are told that these creatures are far more scared of them than they are. The comparison holds good for selling: customers are fearful of being talked into something, being ‘outsmarted’ by sales people and of making decisions that they will later regret. They are afraid of being taken in by some psychological trick or being ‘hoodwinked’ when it comes to price.
It is the responsibility of the sales person to ease the customer’s fears. If they focus on doing this, they will find that their own fears usually evaporate.
Admittedly it is not easy to visit a customer unexpectedly, without prior notice or an appointment. Skilled sales people even have a meagre success rate with this difficult task: 1 meeting out of 20 calls or 1 successful conclusion of business out of 5 visits. They also know, however, that with every telephone call and every visit, they are edging that one step closer to the next deal.
An experienced sales representative works out how much money each telephone call or visit will bring in, regardless of whether they are immediately successful or not.
There is always a wall of reservation and mistrust between a customer and a sales person. This wall protects the customer from making the wrong decision and makes the work of the sales person very difficult.
There is a parable about this: the sun and the wind were challenging each other as to which of them had the most power over people. A man in a thick coat was walking along the road. The wind said: ‘I am so strong that I can blow this man’s coat away!’ The more the wind blew, however, the tighter the man held his coat to himself. The sun, however, showed the man his warmest and friendliest face, which made him take off his thick coat of his own free will.
Only a customer who enthusiastically and unquestioningly breaks down the wall of suspicion will be a good, long-term customer. The most important motto for success is: ‘Just do it!’ You can only be successful by actually doing something. And only successful sales people conquer their fears and gain self-confidence. It is with this in mind that a key target of sales training is to build confidence in sales people.
