Five Sales Beliefs That Spell Doom (and their replacements)

The biggest driver of your success in sales is the beliefs you maintain. Here are five of the unhealthiest, doom-spelling beliefs and five better beliefs with which you can replace them.

1. I Lose Because My Competition Is Bigger

   You don’t lose because your competition is bigger. The size of your competitor has nothing to do with whether you win or lose. Winning is about believing that you can win, and behaving as if you can win. Winning deals is about having the right people, the right ideas, and the ability to produce the right results.

   Replace with: We Fight Above Our Weight Class (Part One and Part Two)

2. My Pipeline Is Good Enough

   Your pipeline is the surest measure of your future success. Too many salespeople believe that because they have one deal on the hook that will account for their quarter, that they are okay. So they work that deal, and the postpone doing any real prospecting work, suggesting that their one great opportunity has them buried.

   It doesn’t. And this is how you miss your quarter, or worse, your year. Your effort doesn’t line up neatly with your results.

   Prospecting is a discipline, not a goal. It needs to be done with a devotion bordering on the religious.

   Replace with: I Prospect Daily

3. Three: I Know Enough to Win

   You have seen your dream client’s problems before. You have helped others with the same or similar problems. Believing you know enough, you look at your dream client’s problems through the lens of your existing solutions.

   But that isn’t their vision. And it doesn’t engage them in helping you to build the right solutions together.

   A healthier belief is too never believe that you can know enough to ensure you understand the ground truth and the human terrain, and to work to obtain a more complete understanding. The kind of understanding that will make you the obvious and only choice.

   The end of the sales cycle is too late to try to learn what you need to know.

   Replace with: I Need to Learn More to Win

4. Four: I Can Go It Alone and Win

   You have been asked to present your solution. You haven’t built the relationships that you need to win or to be successful should you win. But, you are a “professional,” and you believe that this means that you can go it alone.

   The greatest determining factor as to whether or not you win is the relationships you have nurtured over time and can bring with you. These relationships are based on trust, your credibility, your honesty, and your caring.

   If you have no relationships, you are a stranger. Therefore, you don’t deserve to win.

   Replace with: I Build Relationships, and I am Bringing Them With Me

5. Winning Happens in the Boardroom

   The boardroom has much in common with big time wrestling; the scripts are written well in advance, everybody knows their part, and the outcome has already been decided.

   Few contests are ever really won in the boardroom, and your believing it so is an unhealthy delusion.

   It isn’t the show horse that your client wants to hire. It’s the plow horse.

   Replace with: Winning Happens Long Before the Boardroom

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