If you are in sales, then I am willing to bet you are familiar with the reams of sales literature about emotional selling and how most people don’t buy for logical reasons, they buy for emotional reasons.
Of course, focusing on how your customer feels and why they buy is crucial, however the emotions of the salesperson themselves is just as crucial.
As sales is such a roller coaster of emotions, some of these emotions are positive and some may be negatively impacting your results.
The key to being successful in sales is to know how to master these emotions so that you are able to keep on moving towards your goals. But to do this, you need to know what emotions can rule your success.
FEAR
Many salespeople fail simply because they fear that they will fail, be negatively evaluated by either themselves, their peers or their customers or how they will react. It is for that reason that your fear must be tamed before you are able to succeed.
SHAME
Shame and fear go hand in hand and can be destructive to your sales success. It can make you set weak goals because you believe you cannot succeed and leeches all of your motivation to improve on yourself. It can be a steady downward spiral when you are feeling shameful, which can and will negatively affect your success.
CONFIDENCE
Projecting confidence during a sales pitch creates a trust between you and your customer, even if your track result is not so great. It is easy to see that by simply having confidence in yourself, your pitch and your product, that people will trust what you are projecting and more than likely purchase.
PRIDE
Pride is the opposite of shame, when you see results and so do others and you can feel like you’re actually good at what you do and other people know it.
It has to be the right can of pride though, authentic pride is when you have actually put effort into something whereas hubristic pride is due to factors that are out of your control and have often played into your favour. The dangers here being, if you fail during hubristic pride, you will start to think negatively of yourself.
ENTHUSIASM
Enthusiasm is what makes you get out of bed in the morning. No matter if your are currently succeeding or failing, if you have enthusiasm for what you are doing, you will be setting yourself up for future successes. If you are lacking enthusiasm, you can quickly fall into a negative mindset about everything, hindering your ability to succeed.
How to manage and build on your emotions
First be honest with yourself and how you are feeling right now. Acknowledge how you feel when you sit down with your work. Are you enthusiastic? Or are you feeling fear? Mastering your emotions can be a lifelong process, but if you follow these tips, it should get you on the fast track to managing your emotions.
Know that you are in control
And only you. Not your peers, not your customers, not your results. You are in control and taking responsibility for your emotions will give you the ultimate power to succeed.
Focus on the goals
Having and focusing on goals leads the way to positive emotions and can also make small setbacks seem manageable. It forces you to imagine the pride and happiness you will feel when you get there.
Act
Making yourself feel more enthusiastic and proud are nothing without action. Without action, you will achieve nothing. Develop a bias for action and start now.
Your emotions do have a real effect on your sales success, but if you decide to take control of your emotional life and take actions today that will give more power to productive emotions, there is no way you can’t succeed!