Here’s Why You Aren’t Selling More – It’s Cause You Are Counting Chickens
I’ve noticed a behavior going on with many of my clients and it may also be happening with you.
I call it the “counting the chickens before they hatch syndrome”.
Here’s what it looks like:
You’ve got three sales conversations coming up later this week (or strategy sessions or discovery sessions, whatever you call them).
You are super excited. You start to calculate how much money you would generate if they all said yes. At $500 a month – that would mean an extra $1,500 a month!
You even think about how you are going to use that money, exactly what bills you are going to pay off.
You start to visualize being able to tell your partner, your friends or your family that you just signed three new clients.
Then you get to the sales conversation. All you can think about is how you can convince this client to say yes. She has to say yes, after all, you’ve already “counted” her. She’s already a client in your mind.
But the conversation doesn’t quite go as you expected. She has objections. She doesn’t seem to want to do the program. You are full on annoyed and impatient. You start to “push” her to buy from you, using all the reasons YOU want her to join the program. A feeling of desperation breaks out all over you. You start to doubt your ability to be successful and gain clients.
Here’s the problem: you are in your own head. You are not treating this client like the individual that she is. You aren’t really listening. She has become a number – a dollar amount – that will help you pay off the credit card bill next week.
I know that many of you would never willingly do this – it just happens in the moment, as a result of desperation and fear.
Here’s what you need to know. In a sales conversation, you must be able to get out of your own head and be fully present for the person in front of you. That is the only way you’ll be able to understand how to help that person overcome her limiting beliefs, fears and objections and find a way to work with you.
The best sales people aren’t using scripts. They might be following a certain structure in their selling conversations, but the most important thing they are doing is deeply listening. And from that place of listening, they determine the next question to ask, and the next piece of information to collect. It’s like being a detective, listening for the clues to put the picture together.
The easiest way to be fully present is to be detached to the outcome of whether someone buys from you or not. You can’t “count” them in your numbers.
The piece you should be attached to instead is making sure that you move the person in front of you into action. If that action is that she decides to buy from someone else, so be it. If that action is that she does something different in her business, relationship or life, that is fine too.
Yes, you should be aspiring to get better and better at converting prospects into clients. And you’ll find that the more present you are in the moment, the more successful you’ll become.
Give this process a try and leave me a comment on the blog and let me know what you think.
