How to develop your sales expertise

Usain Bolt has won 8 gold medals in 3 Olympics. In all, he ran for less than 115 seconds on the track. And by the same token earned 119 million dollars. But for those 2 minutes (or just under 2 minutes), he trained for 20 years. Every day. He was thinking long-term investment by going out into the field every day.

I can't guarantee that you'll make $119 million, but it is possible to take the same approach in your sales activity. And you don't even have to wear trainers. So how do you go about it? Very simple and very complicated.

Write a daily journal.

Here are three reasons why, in the long term, this habit pays off.

First, get on top of your negative thoughts

It's scientifically proven that we have far more negative thoughts than positive ones. It's simply a question of human evolution. When we were still in the savannah, it was important to interpret the elements around us as dangerous. In order to survive.

We evolved in a dangerous environment for millions of years. Any signal was likely to be a risk to life or death, a long-toothed tiger that might jump out at us, for example.

Obviously, no more risks of this kind nowadays. However, the evolution of human society (a few hundred thousand years) has been faster than biological evolution (a few million years). So our negative bias is still firmly anchored in our brains.

What does this have to do with selling? Well, selling is the activity in which you are most often faced with rejection. Whether during prospecting or during the sales process. In the long run, and amplified by the negative bias and the mistake that many salespeople make of taking these rejections not as rejections directed at the role but at their individuality, it can be wearing.

Just as it is necessary to go to the gym or do sport regularly, it is necessary to have regular emotional gymnastics. A daily diary containing positive affirmations helps to set the record straight. Make sure that our negative thoughts don't gradually take over.

Secondly, develop new communication skills

One of the pillars on which our sales transformation programmes focus is communication. Over the course of our lives, we have acquired some very bad habits (habits are key in selling) when it comes to communicating and interacting with others. For example, one of the problems with salespeople is that we have all been trained during school, college and university to answer questions from teachers.

We were taught that knowing the answer to an authority figure's question meant that we would be properly assessed, that we would benefit from external validation. So in a prospect situation, it's only natural that the sales person would be eager to answer. But the problem in sales is that

The value of a sales person does not come from their ability to provide information, but from their ability to extract it.

And what's more, we humans never ask the questions we have in mind. Whether in our private or professional lives. We always go to a "higher" level than the real question on our minds (has your spouse/partner ever asked you "where are you?" and in that case was it really to find out where you were or the prelude to another question?) The job of a good salesperson is therefore to understand the real questions our prospects are asking us.

During sales transformation programmes, I help sales people acquire new ways of communicating and to get rid of habits that are costing them time and money. But this isn't easy. It takes time to acquire these new habits. And depending on DISC profile of each individual, developing these new ways of communication can be difficult.

So an excellent way of reinforcing a new way to communicate verbally is, weirdly, to write things down, word by word. New ways to make statement, new ways to ask questions, new ways to validate the people we talk to. So that these habits and phrases become part of your Sales DNA.

Just because we understand something intellectually doesn't mean we can articulate it emotionally in front of a prospect. With daily practice (consistency) and a good dose of courage, it is possible to develop new ways of communicating.

Finally, stay motivated to achieve your personal goals

Only 3% of the population have defined their personal goals. 3%... If you are part of the 97%, I recommend that you define them. If you don't know where you're going, then any destination will do...

However, defining where we want to go, our personal objectives, is not enough. Have you ever made new year resolutions on January 1st only to give up in mid-January or early February? I imagine you never did (evil grin), but I've heard of it happening to other people...

There are many reasons for these, one of them is called homeostasis. What is homeostasis?

Homeostasis is any process that living beings use to actively maintain the relatively stable conditions they need to survive.

In other words, it's this internal force that makes us spend as little energy as possible, that keeps us from leaving our comfort zone. Making sure that our lifestyle and habits don't change in order to save the energy we spend. It's this dynamic that sometimes makes us think "I'm never going to make it". In short, our subconscious is trying to discourage us.

So it's important to have the mental gymnastics to keep us motivated enough to achieve our goals. In simple terms, our long-term vision is made possible by the goals we want to achieve. And these goals are made possible by the habits we maintain on a regular, daily or weekly basis.

In sales, these habits could be rehearsing a particular phrase, picking up the phone to prospect or any other habit that helps us to achieve our goals in the service of our vision.

Just as Usain Bolt won 8 gold medals by running for less than 2 minutes, his success was only made possible by daily work. A daily journal helps us to stay on track with our habits and achieve our goals, which will ultimately help us to realise our vision.