Today, social (that’s networking platforms) selling is a critical part of any sales process. I know it’s another thing to do, however, your buyers are already doing it. Critically, if you are not:
- Engaging on social you are not on the radar.
- On your buyer’s social radar, you will not be on their short list.
- On their short list you will not secure a meeting to discuss their needs, let along invited to pitch.
If your sales team have the wrong attitude towards what is a presents day essential go to market strategy, then you have already lost the sale.
Zig Ziglar says, Your Attitude determines your altitude
Mindset is a way of thinking, while attitude is the demonstration of your mindset, Psychologists define attitudes ‘as a learned tendency to evaluate things in a certain way’.
It takes a special breed of person to be prolific in sales. Mindset and attitude are crucial contributors to sales success.
However, if we are all honest, success has traditionally breed ‘egos with attitude’, however, past victories are no longer an indication of future success, especially as the technology is fast to evolve and salespeople are often (caught with their pants down) slow to respond.
Do Not Become a Sales Dinosaur!
Remember Attitude: It does not choose you, you decide it!
When you think of your positive friends and colleagues:
- Do you think they were born with superhuman capabilities? No!
- Are they exposed to the same sad news stories and poor customer service as everyone else? Yes!
So why is it that positive people are so positive? Simple!
Positive people decided to have a positive mindset, and they find strategies to help them remain true in their mission.
If you were to think of the word winner what words would you use to describe it?
Perhaps: “positive attitude, enthusiasm, committed, motivated, confident, optimistic, dedicated, happy and generous”.
These qualities have little to do with a person’s genetic makeup, their mental ability or physical disposition.
Abraham Lincoln agreed when he said, “Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
10 Ways the Company Mindset Stops Salespeople from Maintaining a Positive Mental Attitude
- Doubting their abilities
- Getting stressed or burnt out
- Experiencing poor leadership
- Being isolated in teams
- Live with rejection without support
- Not having control over the delivery of the product they sold
- Working in a negative and unmotivating environment
- Living with uncertainty
- Experiencing poor communication and processes
- Working with unmotivated work colleagues
This environment is difficult enough, and that’s before the salesperson has negotiated the buyer’s environment. It is easy to see why this results in unacceptable underperformance.
Sounds familiar?
To transform your sales team, you need a new ‘way of thinking’. Before you rush to fix the sale person with new tools and skills. Before new tools and programme can be adopted, you must release the demons that suppress your sales team positive mental attitude. You cannot develop attitudes and behaviours with the same old debilitating mindset and culture.
If your results are lagging and performance is inadequate, don’t immediately jump to blame the salesperson. First, ask whether you must change your team’s and company mindset and cultural environment?
Too often, companies try to transform in reverse order.
- The problem: the salesperson is underperforming: The solution: send them for sales training but keep the old mindset.
- The problem: The sales team and the company are underperforming: The solution: implement new processes and change the executive member responsible for the most significant deficit but keep the cultural mindset and behaviours.
No new social programme can fix these problems. While a good social selling programme can promote adoption, it is no silver bullet.
Cultural, digital and social transformation cannot happen on the margins but must filter through the whole organisation. I have known of well-fought deals held-up in legal, failing due to the finance department processes and well-earned customer relationships faltering from production communication issues.
It takes deep commitment across all departments for sales to work at an optimum level.
McKinsey & Company studied organisations that are embracing digital change, and they concluded that executive buy-in is vital. Social, digital and cultural change must come from the top.
Once you have the senior management team on board, then, you can start transforming the attitudes of your sales team, by supporting their positive motivational mindset, which changes their behaviours. Your salespeople rather than racing to the finish line, looking for opportunities to pitch, they must stop over-thinking and relax into building relevant, trusted relationships.
The 4 New Motivational Mindsets Your Salespeople Must Adopt:
- Know who they are talking to and research relevant customer buyer and influencer for best fit.
- Understand how to and why it is necessary to conduct discovery profile question and listening sessions.
- Look for answers to – ‘what can I do to help solve this customer problem?’
- On the mindset of – ‘how can I become more digitally and socially savvy than my buyers and influence the decision-makers’.
Social selling works because it leads to human-to-human interactions. Social automation is the agitator that allows your sales team to leap off to engage, educate and elevate relevant buyers and influencers, relationships. Social selling is not just a process but a social mindset, it is part of a whole company engagement programme, as a digital instigator of human interaction.
Changing a company’s mindset and culture does not happen overnight. Before you can start a company-wide cultural, digital and social sales programme, you must begin at the top. The senior leader’s attitude, in turn, will shape the business, the culture and the sales team’s mindset and attitude.
The sooner you start to support the right environment for a positive motivational mindset and attitude, the sooner you can claim the competitive advantage over your competitors who are still flogging their pitch on the dead buyers’ horse. Working on a motivational mindset is your opportunity to develop the team and business attitudes to build partnership relationships utilising social selling programmes as your starting motor to shape your buyer’s mindset and drive higher revenues
Contact me, if you want to Scale Your Sales with Motivational Mindset
