(Video) The ultimate hack to your sales performance and confidence [it’s not what you think]

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  • (Video) The ultimate hack to your sales performance and confidence [it’s not what you think]

The ultimate hack to your sales performance and confidence [it's not what you think]

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to today’s sales training. In this video, I will talk about the biggest signs of someone really neglecting their sales education. Next, I will talk about how education, your mindset on overall winning in sales and in business is connected. And lastly, I will touch on some of my experience selling different products and services and what are the biggest mistakes? I see people do it right now as we work with different clients, but also the mistakes I’ve seen over the years, working for different companies, for different clients.

So firstly, let’s look at the relationship between sales straining sales performance and the effectiveness of training. Salesforce published a very interesting study on sales, and I picked up some interesting points which illustrate how important it is to really invest into your team and also yourself. If you are a sales professional. So some key points from this research. Number one, informed teams perform better. Secondly, sales training needs to be built into your evolving business strategies in terms of the research they conducted.

We see the differences in perception of sales training between people who perform really well and people who perform, I guess, average people who really underperform below their quota. Eighty percent of high performing salespeople. rate their training to be outstanding, or at least very good in comparison. Only 33 percent of underperformers rate their training to be outstanding or very good. So what this means people who receive great sales training, which is not only effective in terms of what it teaches, but also how it’s perceived, creates people who are able to sell much better.

So obviously, investing into training will make you a better salesperson. This is quite obvious. But for some reason, people neglect this, especially small businesses where the element of learning and improving is often neglected. Just so the short term goals and objectives can be achieved. So people are much more focused on the tactical decisions and sort of the Day-To-Day tasks instead of updating that knowledge and progressing in the strategic way. So now let’s have a look at the top performing companies and how they go about training their salespeople.

And maybe you can compare this to yourself and how you are structuring your education and your training in your business. So here are some common things. Among all the top performing companies. So, number one, they have development plans. This can be broad in terms of how they plan to develop all people of a specific position, or in some cases, this can be personalized for different salespeople according to their specific needs. Number two, their sales training is integrated into the broader business strategies.

What this means, they are really aware of the situation on the market and what is most likely about to happen in terms of their customers, their products and services, and they proactively train their people so that they are able to meet these challenges and future needs. Next, the best companies have training budgets so they know exactly how much they need to invest into their people. And they have people in the H.R. department looking at and sourcing different education plans and programs to develop their teams.

So they have actually a specific budget which needs to be used for the training. And lastly, their skill assessment. So they look at the underperforming salespeople and they look at the ways how they can optimize their existing skill set and also to develop the areas where they are not good at. I guess one of the biggest misconceptions is that the large companies are able to do all these things because they are big and they have the budget. But I would actually argue that this kind of proactive development of their salespeople or in fact people at any position got into the leading position in the first place.

Here are some telltale signs that you may be neglecting your self education. Number one, you rely on referrals. This can be the case with some industries in particular. For example, I come across this the most with companies doing app development and software development. In many cases, these companies are quite new, maybe under two to three years old and their headcount is relatively small. So a number of developers who are working on projects, in many cases, they are able to attract new clients just based on their reputation and their past projects and portfolio.

But ultimately, this strategy is going to dry up eventually.

So using your referrals is basically just a band aid for the lack of sales process and sales knowledge at the moment and thinking only because you are closing deals. You are a great art sales, but in fact it can be the case. But in fact, once your referrals will dry up, you’ll be in a lot of trouble. And we see this basically every single week with, as I said, mostly app development companies or software engineers where they are able to close relatively big projects.

And then suddenly they go from having a lot of work and inquiries to zero and they have nobody in the pipeline, and they are not sure how to generate more business. The other sign is that you don’t have any formalized process. In a way, you are simply doing something. You’re doing some activity here and there, and you’re not even sure how. But at the end, you get a project or a client. Again, this kind of strategy is not sustainable and is really limiting you in terms of how great you can be in your sales.

Next, I know you are not paying attention to sales and your sales education. If you are always busy with fulfilling your service, the telltale sign of this can be that you are engaging in short bursts of sales activity for maybe a couple of weeks until you get a client. And then again, you disappear for a couple of months or weeks to fulfill the service you sold and then you go back again. Well, this can work for some specific period of time, but eventually, you know, you will run out of luck.

And what can happen is that as soon as you finish your service, you will go back again to do some some sales. And then because you don’t have any process, what can easily happen is that you will be not able to close more revenue. So it isn’t one of these obvious truths that many people ignore, but simply, if you are busy doing everything else, from writing blog posts to trying to be on podcasts and doing other types of things, but you are not selling the way you should and you are not happy with how much revenue you are making.

The chances are that you simply don’t understand what really pushes the needle in your business, which is most likely. Getting more leads, getting on sales calls and closing those sales calls. The next telltale sign that you neglect your education is that you lack clarity in your actions. In most cases, this happens when you receive so much information from different sources that you are not sure what to do. Maybe a blog A tells you to do something, but influencer.

Or some guru or or a book tells you to do something else. And this, of course, creates a conflict and you’re not sure what to do. In some cases, you can. Maybe trying to do everything, but end up doing nothing or simply the cognitive dissonance of having so much conflicting information, results in inactivity and at the end you don’t do anything. And you just keep doing what you’ve been doing all this time. And that is maybe relying on referrals or just waiting.

If something some small project falls into your lap. Next, maybe not so obvious is success barriers. The majority of sales training and education I’ve been through, I can tell you honestly that mindset is probably one of the biggest problems people have. Because hurdles people need to overcome if they want to be effective in sales. This doesn’t mean just getting our sales goals, but this means the overall approach about understanding what you need to do to push the needle to get results you want.

The reality is that in most cases, salespeople who are ineffective, they don’t quit the job or they don’t quit on the job, but really they quit on themselves. They’re not able to mentally handle the pressure of performing consistently over time. And lastly, probably one of the biggest signs that you are neglecting your education is simply your performance. We can look at how much you sold or how many leads you were able to generate in the last 90 days.

And based on that, we can probably conclude that, you know, you are doing something. And whather doing that correctly will be determined by your performance. So everything in this training really boils down to this very simple diagram. And this is why I think knowledge is the ultimate hack to being better at sales, because simply the more knowledge you have, the more confidence you have. And that will fuel the correct action. But of course, these three elements don’t work in silos.

They are all interconnected. There is going to be a feedback loop between these different elements where more action is going to provide some real life feedback, to your knowledge. So you understand not only what works on paper, but how it really works in your marketplace. And also the more action you take, more confident you you will get. And so on. So all these different elements interact. And that’s why it’s important to start with the stepping stone.

And that is your sales training and updating your knowledge. When it comes to sales knowledge and training. Well, you’re really benefiting in two ways. Firstly, you’ll be able to acquire strategic knowledge. And that means insight, foresight and hindsight. So inside you will be able to see the relationship between all different elements that are involved in your sales process. The this process today is relatively complex and is getting more and more complex with different tools. And the customer behavior changing.

And also the the customers or or prospects have more and more buying power as time progresses. So you have to really carefully manage all different elements to understand how to interact. And what is the right thing to do at the moment. Foresight, foresight. This is expecting was yet to come. And being able to foresee the future elements and how your market and the sales environment is going to change. And hindsight is learning from past mistakes. And these mistakes don’t have to be your mistakes.

You can learn from mistakes other people did. And I think this is probably one of the best, most effective ways how to learn, because making your own mistakes is extremely costly, painful, and many people simply can’t handle that. And we all know this is true, especially if you’re a salesperson, because we can just look at how high is the staff turnover in sales positions, whereas simply people can’t deal with the amount of rejection and failures they’re making.

And instead of learning from mistakes from other people, they keep making mistakes. In some cases, over and over again, eventually this will put them out of the game. The other aspect of sales training and sales knowledge is tactical. So this means actual things you do on a daily basis to give them a prospects, to generate conversations, to close them. And this can be analytics, which again is the research from Salesforce shows analytics and understanding data is a huge driver of success for, to high performers.

Then technology was the best technology to use, how to use it, how to optimize your time. And lastly, tactical steps in terms of the sales process. So how to handle sales calls, how to write cold emails, how to follow up and how to be good as copywriting. So now let’s talk about confidence and how confidence is going to influence the entire ecosystem. As we talked before, knowledge will add to your confidence. And I think here we can talk about definite optimism.

So to borrow the term from zero to one from Peter Thiel, basically it is knowing what you want to do and how you will do it. So you have a very clear picture in your mind, how you will achieve your goal. And what it does is sales calls closing a deal or making X amount of successful cold calling attempts. Confidence will give you the necessary conviction that you are doing the right things at the right time. So, for example, if you weren’t confident in your actions and you are presented with a situation where you’re not sure what to do.

You could be considering completely changing your approach, which is, of course, maybe not always the best solution. In some cases you have to iterate instead of changing. And having the knowledge that what you’re doing is correct and that time is going to result in positive outcomes instead of changing your approach. And again, smashing your head against the wall and trying to figure it out yourself once again. And from square one. And lastly, confidence is linked to the clarity in terms of what activities you should be doing to push the needle and what activity you should be doing to push the business to the next level.

Whether that is in terms of sales or making strategic sales decisions. So next, is action. I already touched on how being confident will impact the actions you take in terms of will you make big steps towards improving your business and generating more revenue? Or will you spend the time on trivial, small activities which are not going to produce any results? So your actions will be influenced in also these ways. Number one, you will completely eliminate procrastination because you will understand what you are doing and what is likely going to be the impact of actions.

You will be simply too busy to procrastinate. If you’re truly passionate about your business and it is something you are proud of, you will want to implement as soon as possible because you will have the conviction. What you’re doing will produce certain results. It is not going to produce the results you want. Then you should have the knowledge to know how to analyze what happened and how to fix it. So therefore, really, there isn’t a reason why to fail.

Simply, you have to follow the process and take action towards your goals because you learned how to do it. Next, you will be able to take a step back and stop being busy all the time with work, which doesn’t produce any results or work that just feels like you are doing something.

But in effect, you should be doing other things which are more important and you switch to processes and strategy. So now let’s examine where people go wrong and why. Here are the three elements we just talked about. So let’s start with knowledge. Number one, people don’t acquire the necessary knowledge and in most cases, people know they need help and they simply refuse to get help for whatever reason. Maybe they don’t believe in themselves. They don’t believe in the

the coach or the company that’s trying to help them. And simply what they do, They refuse help and they decide to be stuck where they are in hopes that they will be able to do it themselves. Problem or where people go wrong. Number two is that people consume all the information. Most likely this is going to be free information because they simply want to get as much as possible. Right. Because it’s for free. And they think the more they get, the better.

And because of all this free information, they are not sure what they should be doing because there is a conflict and most cases between different advice they receive. And lastly, maybe a combination of the two I mentioned before, when people think they know it all, these kind of people simply refuse to get help, not because of of financial reasons, but simply they think they can do it themselves and they can do it better. Next is confidence. So, of course, if you are not sure what you’re doing and you lack clarity or you don’t have the necessary knowledge, you can be confident in your actions.

So all the points I discussed on the confidence slide simply don’t happen because you can’t build your confidence on any concrete knowledge and action steps. Lastly, in terms of actions, if you don’t have the knowledge and the confidence, you will simply never take the action. And if you take the action without the right knowledge, you will eventually fail. And this can happen very quickly, or this can be slow death by a thousand cuts where you simply keep banging your head against the wall over and over for weeks, months and eventually years, and your business simply stagnates or you never progress in any real meaningful way.

So this is why I say that basically investing into your training and your knowledge is the ultimate sales hack. I would say the training and consulting is better than self study. Of course, this depends on the state of our business. Maybe if you are just starting out and you’re not even sure about your service, your product or your offer, your audience, maybe it is better to start with self study and to get up to speed with the basics through books, through some free videos like this one.

So you know where you should be doing in the first place. However, if you’ve been running your business maybe for a couple of months or a couple of years and you are still running into the same problems. I think training and consulting is probably the best way how to get this knowledge. Receiving the training from someone who specializes, especially in your problems, will have positive implications on your confidence, but also on your actions. In terms of confidence – you will be able to buy all the years of trial and error and also all the investment they made into their knowledge.

Usually with a complete fraction of what they actually invested. If you count all the years trials and also the dollar value, they invest that into themselves. And lastly, once you have this confidence in the process they give, you can simply go and implement it yourself. You are never going to be depending on them to implement it for you. If they leave, you’re not left in big trouble looking into a new provider and how you can bring the cells back up, but simply if they teach you, you can teach it to your team or you can implement it yourself.

This will provide you with a skill set for life where you start a new business, or if you change your offer, you change the market. You are still able to sell to them, in most cases using the skills that you learned from the sales consultant. That’s all for today. Thank you so much for watching. And I really hope you enjoyed this video. If you did please make sure to light this video and to subscribe. And speaking about training, we published our free sales framework, which focuses on copyrighting.

It is the exact framework we use when we write Cold emails for our clients. It’s called the 20, 60, 20 rule of copywriting. It is completely free. So if he wants to grab a copy, simply go to the description box below and click on the first link to download it. So while we wait for the next training, make sure to download this and then you can continue watching more videos. So, as I said, that’s all from me for today.

Thank you so much. Speak to next time.

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