The Scale of Confidence

by Nick Terrenzi
Confidence—the 5th “C” of the SELLability 8 C’s of selling.
Did you know that there is a “scale of confidence”? It goes from the top, where a salesperson is totally confident and willing to sell anything to anybody, all the way down to the point where the salesperson won’t make the first effort to sell anything at all. All of their motivation and confidence seems to have been eroded. What happens to cause the salesperson to go down this scale?
Well, what’s the first thing that happens when a salesperson enters into a sale? The prospect starts objecting. When a salesperson doesn’t fully understand how to handle objections, they start getting “knocked about” by them. To a greater or lesser degree, they start going down the scale right at that point.
As the salesperson enters into sale after sale, and smacks into objection after objection, and encounters that ever-present sales resistance, they are pushed further and further down this scale of confidence. After a while, they’re not selling. They are that “problem salesperson” in the bottom 20 percent of salespeople. If nothing is done about this problem, they’re likely to quit entirely and seek out another career.
You might have witnessed the new salesperson who starts in at a company and goes straight to the top of the leader board. The rest of the sales team—mainly the veteran salespeople—look at such a person and sarcastically dismiss their success as “beginner’s luck.” There’s no other explanation for a person walking in “off the street” and being able to sell like that.
It’s not actually beginner’s luck. It’s confidence. Because this new salesperson has never had failures, they are enthusiastically charging right in. The veterans criticizing the “newbies” have had too many rejections, and have become jaded.
Reactive Buying Process
As we’ve said many times, the buying process is reactive. There is sales resistance built right into it. If this wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t need expert salespeople to guide prospects to make the right decision.
When a salesperson approaches a prospect, the prospect “reacts” to the salesperson. These reactions are in the form of objections, and could also be expressed as “sales resistance.” Because the salesperson doesn’t know quite how to deal with this resistance, they react to the prospect’s reaction—what we call “resisting the resistance.” Then the prospect reacts again. Then the salesperson reacts to that reaction. Then the prospect…and so it goes. The net result for the salesperson is that they drop further, and further, and further down the scale of confidence.
Fortunately, this is a situation that can not only be remedied for a salesperson, but prevented in the first place. Sales training offered by SELLability includes how to handle objections and sales resistance so that the salesperson remains at the top of the confidence scale. If you never drop down this scale, you smoothly guide the prospect through all that resistance and all those objections, right to the close.
To learn more, sign up at SELLability.com.