Mental barriers for sales success.

06 Nov 2019

5 mental barriers affecting your sales success

Everyone in sales is looking for success, but very few are able to achieve it consistently. Why is that?

There are many reasons, but primarily selling is not taught formally anywhere and many are naturally not good at sales.

Also, the salespeople are under pressure that most people can’t take. Selling requires to be of help, be at ease with people who have little or no wish to see or listen to the salesperson.

The selling also requires to create awareness of needs to the buyers which they themselves don’t realize in the first place, and they will have no intention to spend money.

One must be tactful, assertive and also forceful enough to get the potential buyers to listen to him with honest methods. And top of that this has to be done consistently week on week, month on month.

Selling cannot be learned quickly also. It takes lot of persistence. Above all compared to any other fields, many external factors play in success or failure of sales. In fields such as engineering, operations there is a lot more control over the outcome from individual efforts compared to sales.

So considering these what are those qualities must for salespeople to become successful?

Recently when we did a survey on this question, many sales leaders who have been in sales for 15+ years shared their response.

The response is as below,

Necessary qualities to become successful in sales

Dealing with rejection
Developing persuasion skills
Importance of presence in sales
Persistent
Ability to understand needs
Discipline
Ability and willingness to learn
Developing the mindset to complete the task
Having Confidence, facing unknown people
Committed, Proactive, Determined
Developing love for sales
Ability to challenge themselves
Developing an Emotional, Mental and Physical fitness
Self-Belief
Ability to accept mistakes
High aspiration

So, as you can see, we got 20+ different yet necessary qualities from sales leaders who responded. If we had asked more people, I am sure some more responses would have come.

But the core question is, the qualities listed above are not something unknown. Most salespeople are aware and also many sales managers do motivate their team members to imbibe the above qualities.

But in spite of that , most salespeople find difficult to acquire these qualities and do not succeed the way they want or others expect out of them.

Why is that?

Mental barriers preventing sales success

The reason is the mental barriers many salespeople acquire as they start getting experience in sales. These mental barriers prevent them to acquire the qualities needed to become a high-performance salesperson.

Here is a list of top 5 mental barriers which is preventing to succeed in sales.

Please do reflect on these and from our experience of sales coaching we can convincing say that overcoming these mental blocks can help you boost your sales success significantly!

  1. Stick to own methods: Many salespeople, especially the old hands or the ones with experience (In sales even a 1-year experience person can claim he is old hand!!), are quite sure about their “own method” (which is many times no method at all!) is the only right one. They are vocal about saying “They know how to sell and stick to the same way in spite of the change in the market, buyers, buying behaviors”. Instead of adopting the attitude of learning the new tried and tested approaches, they prefer to stick to their own methods.
  2. It is not my mistake: It is general nature for those who are in sales to blame others for a lost sale. As said there can be many factors for sales success, so most people prefer to find something – the customer, the product, the tech support, the time, industry slowdown, weather, etc. for lost sales rather than on themselves. The habit of salespeople finding faults outside, instead of doing self-analysis to find the root cause of failure is harming them to learn which is critical quality.
  3. Meetings will turn to sales: Most salespeople believe that until the customer turns them down, they are still in the race. When they get out of the negotiation, they are happy they are not outrightly turned down by the customer yet. They fail to realize that they didn’t get order means the meeting was not successful and the chances of winning sales are almost over!
  4. Overrating their understanding of sales psychology: Buying is a psychological process. But most salespeople have very little psychological understanding. With their limited experience, they overrate their insights into human nature. This is because they don’t like to understand their own personalities and also they are keen on short term success and out of touch with reality.
  5. Averse to planning and following process: This is very important. Most of the salespeople are busy doing what they already know and happy with little improvisations. They are aversed to planning and methods. Yet most studies have shown, sales are methodical and following process and planning yields much more success than just a mere repetitive hard work.

The above the 5 core reasons are something we have come across among most people who are in sales. No doubt, that selling outcomes cannot be predicted with absolute certainty as it involves interpersonal relations.

But still, there are many factors which salespeople can only influence provided, they are willing to upgrade themselves in terms of skills, process, and knowledge and above all the mental attitude.

Ref: How to win customers – Heinz M Goldman

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