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If you haven't already, I suggest before continuing reading this blog, to firstly go through the first 3 blogs the series "Developing the Business Mind""
"…I often hear people that are in the process of giving up that they have done everything in their power to make their business work yet, they keep on failing. When opening the point with them, there are underlying currents of excuses, justification and projected blame as to why they are not making it in sales. This has primarily to do with the main 2 components that we discussed thus far- the 'WHY' and 'Effective Numbers game' application.
I looked at this point and the process that I've walked and I found that there is one more primary component that needs to be realized and applied in one's process of developing a sales business mind - the Comfort Zone - this will be discussed in the next blog post."
An interesting thing that I found with regards to the 'Comfort Zone' is that in many cases, the comfort zone is not necessarily a physical place that we feel comfortable at - Fascinating enough, the comfort zone is primarily inside our own MIND. Let me explain:
As a sales person, 80% of your time should be allocated for lead generation, to ensure a consistent flow of the business where new clients come on board on a regular basis. Once they have leads, the next step is to call these leads and schedule appointments and afterwards, make the sale. Some sales people would develop a resistance to lead generations, others would create a resistance to scheduling appointments, others would have resistance to make the appointments - but all sales people at some stage or another would experience a resistance, even if it is just a slight resistance.
Resistance has usually to do with fears or beliefs about ourselves like: "I don't want to make mistakes", "I feel that I am not ready", "I need to perfect myself before I meet people", "I don't know what to say" and so forth.
Resistance can also be due to difficulties with following a strict routine like for instance, having to do the same thing every day can create the experience of boredom inside of ourselves and we would want to rebel against our strict schedule with saying to ourselves, for instance: "I don't want to do it today, I will do it tomorrow" or "I made enough sales this month, let's just chill out".
Another type of resistance that a salesperson may face occurs just before they go out for an appointment, here I found that the resistance is mostly undefined, very slight, not so many thoughts around it - it is primarily an experience - this I will open up in one of my next blog posts.
In this blog post, I would like to share about my own experience that I faced in relation to scheduling appointments and how I supported myself to step out of the resistance and apply that which I needed to apply:
What I found for myself in my previous work place is my tendency to pick up the phone and call people BUT 90% of my calls where towards my old clients, aiming to give them a service, follow up on them, maintaining my relationship with them - though, in self honesty - it was an escape from having to deal with new people; I felt much more comfortable talking with my existing clients rather than recruiting new clients.
I remember a time where my boss asked me why am I not scheduling new appointments - I looked at him and said - "you have no idea how busy I am with giving service to my clients - it takes up most of my day to give them the best service that I can". And I mean, with me saying that in the tonality that I expressed myself as - no one could argue with me, I sounded so confident in my words as if giving service to my existing clients is the most important thing in the world.
So - my justifications/excuses were validated by my work environment which for a moment, I actually believed that I must only focus on existing clients and get referrals here and there, instead of aligning my schedule in such a way where I do give service to existing clients BUT, spending most of my time to lead generation and scheduling appointments so that my business could grow effectively.
The resistance that I faced was with contacting new people, with creating a relationship with new people opposed to feeling 'safe' with the clients that I already know. To me, contacting new people met with great effort on a mental level - this part of the business was not yet natural to me in the sense that I could just do it without having to think about what to say or how to act. By allowing myself to resist this part of the business instead of supporting myself to master the application as a living expression of myself, I compromised my business by going into my comfort zone in the mind, accepting my resistance to interact with new people (prospect clients).
What do I mean by 'Comfort Zone' - the mind keeps on bringing excuses and justifications that at times, seem so real and right. By accepting these resistances as validated thoughts, justifications and excuses, we allow ourselves to not follow through with what we planned to do, but instead we fall back to what we naturally good at. In my case, I was naturally good in giving services to my clients, maintaining my relationship with them, making sure that they are happy with the product and/or the company. In this, there was no mental effort on my side - it was an easy application - this was my mental comfort zone.
When I investigated my resistances to do lead generation and/or call to schedule appointments - one of the dimensions that I found was the idea that I was bored with this type of routine; meaning, this was the excuse that I primarily used inside myself to not step out of my comfort zone. When opening up the point of boredom, I found that I haven't effectively integrated the concept of the numbers game so every time I was about to call a new prospect clients I had this thought: "No, not again, I don't want to do it". So what I then did to support myself in physically stepping out of my comfort zone was to find ways to make it entertaining when contacting a new prospect client. I would, for instance, give myself challenges like: "while calling this client, stand on one foot" or " while calling this client, stand on the chair" lol. Another method that I found was to change my script and every time pitch differently - In this, I transformed the boredom experience into something that is fun and entertaining, not allowing the mind to have any justifications and excuses such as boredom.
By changing the dynamic when calling new people, I started to enjoy contacting new people and the resistances that I faced before, started to fade away. Essentially, as I pushed through and applied the techniques of contacting new people, I perfected the skill within myself and eventually it became a normal living expression of myself that didn't require any mental effort.
Will continue with the comfort zone concept more in the next blog post
1 comments:
Really cool and supportive series here, Maya - thanks for writing!
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