While there are many differences between elite salespeople and average salespeople, two of the more important distinctions are the ability to sell value (they can sell at a slight premium on price) and the ability to reach the top levels of the prospect’s decision-making team (typically the C-Suite).

Here are 3 keys to getting in front of senior level executives:

1. You must find someone to introduce or refer you. Recent studies have revealed that 80% of senior executives when surveyed have responded that they are extremely unlikely to meet with you or return your call or reply to your email if they don’t know you and your firm.  Cold calling, while for the most part is never effective is even worse when you are calling the top level of the organization.
2. Brevity is beautiful. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “the most valuable of all talents is never using two words when one will do.”  C-Suite executives have the attention span of an 8-year-old in front of a broken-down ice cream truck on a hot summer day.  Keep it simple.  Keep it short.
3. Tailor your message for resonance. Are you talking about issues that matter to senior executives?  Are you speaking their love language (talking about problems and solutions)?  If not, you are easy to ignore.

Happy selling.  I need to go.  I think I hear the ice cream truck heading by our office.

Selling is a “slight edge business.” By that, we mean that the line that separates high performers from mediocre performers is usually a very small difference.

There is very little you can control in selling. You can’t make prospects take your call.  You can’t make prospects agree to meet with you. You can’t make them move forward in your sales process and you certainly can’t make them buy from you. However, there is a multitude of things you are in control of and mastery of these 10 tips will give you greater confidence in sales.

How to Build Confidence in Sales

1. Identify and Create a Sales Process
2. Practice and Improve your Sales Pitch
3. Follow Up on Open Deals
4. Be a Great Listener
5. Embrace Rejection
6. Learn from a Mentor
7. Review your Strengths and Weaknesses
8. Identify what Motivates You
9. Be Able to Walk Away
10. Prioritize your Wellbeing

1. Identify and Create a Sales Process

First and foremost, you’ll need a repeatable sales process that you and your sales team can implement. Based in the #1 sales evaluation, “elite” salespeople utilize a consistent, stage-based selling system. Having a sales process keeps salespeople on track on the stages a buyer goes through on the path to a decision and will help to remove any inefficiencies from the sales cycle. Just by implementing a great sales process alone, salespeople can see better results in a short period of time. 

2. Practice and Improve your Sales Pitch

Much like your sales process, sales reps need to hone, craft, and practice their perfect sales pitch. You can start creating a better sales pitch by doing more research on your prospects, always put yourself in their shoes and ask through their lens “what’s in it for me?”. As a salesperson, you must invoke confidence. You can do this by practicing and perfecting your sales pitch. We call this your Unique Selling Approach and when you share it, your prospect should react with “That’s me” or “How do you do that?” Practice this so that your USA is natural and conversational to build your confidence in selling. 

3. Follow Up on Open Deals

A good sales rep follows up on open deals.  It’s great to get the word out, but as a salesperson, you will have more success following up on your existing prospects. It’s estimated that nearly half of salespeople never follow up on a prospect, and only 10% follow up three times or more. In fact, it’s estimated that 80% of all closed deals occur between the 5th and 12th outreach.

Following up also shows the prospect that you’re organized and considerate to reach out again.  Most people will appreciate your follow up, and just by reminding them of your previous conversation, you can be more top-of-mind amongst your prospects, and build credibility.

4. Be a Great Listener

Having an open dialogue is critical in nurturing your prospects and giving them a voice.  Make sure you’re really listening to what they’re saying as it can help you close more deals. By listening to better understand your prospects, you can better identify what your prospect wants, how they want it, and why. Listening to understand takes concentration and the ability to not get distracted by what you can offer as a solution. Only by understanding what your prospect wants and needs from you, will you build confidence in sales that will allow you to better align your sales pitch to meet and exceed their expectations. 

5. Embrace Rejection

In sales, you will always be met with rejection.  Accepting this fact, and learning from your no’s is key in becoming a better salesperson. A better way of dealing with rejection is by better uncovering why the prospect did not buy from you.  This will help you build confidence and improve your sales process with better prospect information.

Elite salespeople are quick to get back on track and have robust sales pipelines. Rejection in sales is just part of the job that helps them move on to the next opportunity.

6. Learn from a Mentor

Learning from a mentor is one of the best ways to build confidence in sales and become a better salesperson. Having someone who can show you the ropes and provide constructive feedback, can drastically improve your sales abilities. If your company is looking for professional sales training, guidance, and leadership, check out our sales growth coaching program. 

7. Review your Strengths and Weaknesses

All great salesperson take time to evaluate their strengths and their weaknesses and focus on leveraging their strengths, while working on strengthening their weaknesses. Purposely identifying areas where you seem to excel in prospecting, communicating with prospects, or closing deals, can help you increase more of those desired actions. Sales evaluations can provide salespeople insight in areas they may not recognize, to help build confidence in your selling approach. And by identifying your weaknesses, you can improve upon your weakness or work around it. Successful and confident salespeople are continual learners that intentionally gather information about their own strengths and weaknesses.

8. Identify what Motivates You

We all have motives behind everything that we do.  Identifying what motivates you can be one of the best things you can do to become a better salesperson. Are you motivated to become a better version of yourself?  Do you seek praise and want your work to be recognized?  Are you trying to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams? By recognizing what motivates you, you can start to put into play an action plan that gets you to your goals. This can be all the motivation to become a better salesperson and close more deals.

9. Be Able to Walk Away

Earlier we mentioned the importance of following up.  But it’s also important to know when to fold the cards and walk away. If you’re reaching into double-digit attempts in outreach to a prospect, or they have seemed very standoffish, it might be in your best interest to recognize the situation and walk away. This can be hard to do the further you are down the sales pipeline, but you must be able to let go of a prospect and move on to your next opportunity. If a prospect is not returning your emails or phone calls, your time is better spent on new leads.

10. Prioritize your Wellbeing

You have to prioritize your work/life balance and mental health. You’re no good to your company or your prospect’s time if you have too much going on, are burnt out, and distracted. The world of sales can seem like it’s always moving and moving quickly, which can be stressful.  Taking frequent breaks, getting fresh air, taking time off, and prioritizing a personal life can help counter balance the stress of your job and prevent burnout. In order to be relaxed and confident in selling, you must be healthy of mind and body!

 In Summary

Selling is not going to suddenly become easier.  Leads are not likely to become more plentiful. So, the question that is worth asking is this:  What will you do to create your slight edge in selling? What are the little things that when done week in and week out will amount to great progress in terms of your production? Try out one or all of these 10 tips for building confidence in selling and let us know how they work for you.

Back in the early seventies there was a group called The Main Ingredient. At the time, they had a hit song and the lyrics went something like this… “ So you’re heart broken, you’re sitting around moping, crying and crying. You even feel like dyin’. Well, before you do something rash, dig this- everybody plays the fool!”

In our world of selling, maybe everybody doesn't play the fool, but we know this, dealing with rejection in sales is part of the job. Everybody gets rejected. So, the question is when that happens, what happens? Does it take you two minutes, two hours, two days, two weeks to recover, or are you able to get right back into the fight? When we find people have a hard time recovering from rejection, it’s probably one of two reasons. Number one: they're way too emotionally involved in this sale. “If I don't get this sale, I'm in trouble. If I do get this sale, my year is made!”

And the second reason is people don't have the pipeline that they should have. It's not as robust and filled with other good prospects as it could be. So, when those two things happen, maybe we take the rejection a little harder than we should.

Here's a formula that I believe you can use that'll help you get past your fear and help you deal with rejection. The formula is simply this; SW³ N. And that stands for this…

Some will. Some won't. So what. Next!

Keep that mantra chanting in your head! Some of the salespeople I work with even write it down on their desk and refer to it as they’re saying goodbye to one prospect and trying to find their next opportunity. Somebody needs what you do, go find them. And when you do, don't fear rejection.  Remember SW³ N.

Building rapport in selling is really all about being caring and friendly, asking the right questions, and offering great advice and solutions.

There are 5 competencies that make a salesperson strong at developing relationships in sales.

The title of this blog is also a highly searched keyword phrase on Google. Because we always try to write about topics that salespeople want to read, we are going to focus on this very important topic of how to build rapport in sales. I want you to think about a business relationship that you have that you think highly of, recommend, and will likely never leave. For my example, I will talk about our auto servicing and repair group, Donovan’s.

We have two cars in our family so we need a good service provider and we keep our cars on a regular maintenance program, so you might say, we are good prospects for this type of service. I found Donovan’s by following the general manager Chris over from another auto servicing group that was not nearly as good or memorable, but Chris was and is!

How to build rapport – Chris has always been courteous, happy to speak to me, remembers me and my car, does not keep me on hold, asks the appropriate questions about the issue needing service, calls me with the estimate, and has the car ready on time. In essence, he delivers. I would say that these are the components of rapport with Chris: genuine friendliness – he cares, consistency in availability, delivering the service needed, and advice and recommendations simply explained. When something expensive needs to be addressed, he will tell me what it is, why it needs to be fixed, and what happens if I don’t fix it. I never feel like I am being sold but I do feel like I am being taken care of.

Read the book – Go-Givers Sell More by Bob Burg and John Mann for more on this topic. Building rapport is just part of the business process for Donovan’s – if Chris does not answer the phone, whoever does is also friendly, caring, and helpful. They have found a recipe for success and it works. All of their people follow an approach that stands out from the auto servicing crowd. Additionally, after every service, their owner texts me to ask how they did. Now that is unique! I typically do not allow texts from companies but he is very specific in his question and once I answer it, that is that. That is not marketing or selling, it is building rapport! I feel like I can call the owner of Donovan’s at any time and talk to him directly, and would bet he will be as helpful, gracious, and caring as Chris.

One last thing about how to build rapport. When my son Steven was learning to drive, I reached out to Chris and asked if one of them would be willing to spend 15-20 minutes walking him around the car, helping him to change a tire if needed, checking the air pressure in the tires, checking the oil, etc. Chris (who is also the manager) did this himself and Steven learned some very valuable things about his car. He also remembers Chris each time he takes our car in for service. Did I mention that Donovan’s is not the cheapest auto service provider? That is not what I am looking for when it comes to something we depend on every day. However, they deliver more than what's expected at a fair price. Think about your business, do you do that? Nothing builds rapport like overdelivering on a service.

We use the #1 sales assessment in the industry by Objective Management Group which defines the 21 sales core competencies needed for sales mastery. Here are the competencies for Relationship Builder:

1. Quickly develops rapport
2. The relationship is the key factor to winning business
3. Develops strong relationships over time
4. Customers follow them to new companies
5. Is extroverted

I would say that Chris and the folks at Donovan’s do a very good job on these 5 competencies, wouldn’t you? Building rapport in selling is really all about being caring and friendly, asking the right questions, and offering great advice and solutions. Think about what you and your people can do differently to build better rapport with your clients. It will extend the life of your relationships and they will tell others!

Knowing and understanding your prospect's buying motives allows you to make better decisions on whether to engage and pursue a potential sales opportunity.

Before I decided to pursue a business degree in college (yes, I know that was a long time ago), I briefly pondered studying psychology. I find some aspects of that field to be quite interesting in terms of understanding the things that drive people to make the decisions they make. In sales, I think about how to use this to understand customer buying motives. The great Dr. Sigmund Freud is credited with uncovering the pain-pleasure principle, which says that most decisions people make in their life are driven by the desire to avoid pain or obtain pleasure.

Think about that for just a minute and how far-reaching that is in your life. If you decided to get up early this morning and exercise, that was probably driven by the desire to avoid the pain of bad health. If you had a big helping of biscuits and gravy for breakfast this morning (don’t judge me) that was driven by the desire to obtain pleasure. If you are putting off having a difficult conversation with a co-worker, that is quite likely being driven by the decision to avoid the pain of a challenging discussion.

But what about your prospects? How much do you know about the buying motives of your prospects? Dr. Freud would say his pain-pleasure principle still applies. If you have been exposed to even a small amount of Anthony Cole Training Group content, then you know that we are huge believers in asking two questions of all prospects:

1. Do you have a problem?
2. Do you have to fix it?

When we teach advanced selling techniques, we go one step further – we dig into what is going to motivate that prospect to make their decision. And we know that since change is hard, the easiest thing for a prospect to do is nothing. Not making a decision is making a decision, and that decision is often influenced by taking the path of least resistance, which is to maintain the status quo.

As it turns out, your most significant competitive threat may not be coming from one of your competitors. It might be PI, what I call prospect indifference, or just keeping with the status quo. And what would motivate a prospect to make that decision? Because it is an easy decision, the prospect can avoid the pain of change as well as the change of delivering unpleasant news to the existing service provider.

Think about your prospects or customers’ buying motives on your next sales call. It will allow you to make better decisions on whether to engage with a prospect. After all, shouldn’t one of your motives be to understand your prospect’s motives?