4 brilliant ways to manage how you feel to increase sales

Life has its ups and downs.

9.30am your first customer and a joy to be with. Personable, joyful and very positive. Within 2 hours you have everything organised for them and a really good sale in the bag. You enjoy the best cup of coffee you’ve had for a long time and you learn that you’ve been selected as the top salesperson in the region.

After lunch you get two phone calls. One from a client cancelling their application and proposals with you and the second call from head office advising that you’ve had a complaint registered against you.

The cup of tea you have tastes sour and your partner calls to say they’ve been caught speeding by a speed camera.

Life has its ups and downs.

In the UK, most people have 14 negative thoughts for every positive thought. So you go home remembering the negative things that happen to you and that affects your mood or state all evening.

If you leave events in normal life to determine your state, then you’re just going to have to hope for lots of good news and good results. But life’s not like that. If you’ve stretched yourself with your goals, then you will approach brick walls, have set backs, rejection. In selling you’re going to get lots of these. It happens. Get used to it, learn to deal with it.

We going to explore some practical ways you can adopt to deal with these ups and downs.

Use your body

Most of us are bought into the fact that the body and the mind are connected. An illness might make you feel low or down. Being physically tired from hard graft all day can affect how you feel. This is obvious.

Let me try something with you. Imagine if you would, fresh bacon being fried on an open fire in a camp site. You walk towards the smell and the aroma wafts over your nose. Three crispy slices of bacon are put on your plate and you take a little nibble from the juiciest piece.

Now if you imagined that scene strongly enough you would have developed some saliva. What you imagined has affected your body.

A few Christmas’s ago I dressed up as Father Christmas and some friends and I travelled around on a sleigh wishing everyone on the estate a Happy Christmas. We were also collecting money for charity. One of our venues was a warden assisted home with about 30 residents average age 70. My friend (an elf I think) wandered in and came face to face with a room of people comotosed watching TV. They were slumped in their chairs and had been so for hours by the look of it. There was no energy, no excitement in the room.

Until I arrived. “Ho, ho, ho ,ho…Merry Christmas” I cried. A few people looked at me and forced a smile. You see, sitting slumped for hours on end can induce this uninterested listless state. “Come and see my sleigh through the window” I beckoned. One by one they got out of their chairs and walked over to the window. Immediately they brightened up and began to smile. More followed and soon virtually the whole room was moving around.

When we left after 5 minutes the state of mind of all the residents had changed dramatically primarily due to physical movement.

I’ve been told that to be dynamic on any one day you should do something physical before 9am. When I go for a run or a walk with my dog Brodie, I often feel better when I return. A lot of this is due to nature’s natural chemical – endorphins, which boost your mind with positive feelings. It’s free and legal too.

Try it next time you need a boost. Just walk around, relax your shoulders, look ahead and look up. Walk slowly and deliberately, smile at people…glide and feel confidence growing in you.

Self Talk

We know about self talk and how it can affect salespeople and their sales performance. But to really understand why it’s so powerful, please appreciate that there is a link. What we think about, affects how we feel and this in turn affects what action we take.
So thinking or self talk has a deliberate connection with how we feel. The other popular way of looking at this is the conscious and unconscious mind idea that’s been floating around for a few years now.

I buy into this but I don’t like all the terms we use. Unconscious mind sounds a bit whacky doesn’t it. Put simply everything we’re conscious of doing such as typing on my laptop, the music I’m listening to, my own self talk is all in the conscious mind. However there’s loads going on behind the curtain which is automated and is maintaining my body systems and collecting data from my conscious mind all the time. The behind the scenes mind or unconscious mind, continually receives data from your conscious mind and then assumes this is true and stores it.

It’s a bit like a computer. All it does is store the data we put into it. It doesn’t filter the data, or think about it’s authenticity – it just stores it until we need it again.
Your unconscious mind will leak feelings back to you and these affect your actions. And the best way of influencing these feelings is to self talk to your unconscious mind.
I remember flying with a friend from Dublin to Birmingham. I’d only met this person briefly in Dublin and we were sitting next to each other. You know when you first meet someone, you want to chat and talk. Silence is not so good unless the person is a real good friend. They say that don’t they? Your best friend is someone you are comfortable being silent with. Anyway we were chatting away happily and the conversation turned to our fears of flying.

I explained that I dreaded the landing. How vulnerable the plane must be – a huge piece of engineering landing a few flimsy looking wheels. A crash is imminent. Neive continued to talk about her fear of turbulence and losing control whilst 20,000 feet about the Isle of Mann.

Now you can imagine what this talking was doing to our state of mind. I was dreading landing in 30 minutes time and poor old Neive’s face when the Captain announced we were heading into some turbulence!

Now that was actual talk but self talk is the same except other people can’t hear it.
The trick is to feed your unconscious mind with positive self talk when you want to improve your feelings or state of mind.

I always recall the scene in my favourite movie “American Beauty” when Annette Bening is frantically cleaning a house she is about to show a prospective client and she keeps saying to herself “I will sell this house, I will sell this house, I will sell…”

One of the bests ways to so this is by using Affirmations.

Affirmations

Affirmations are really powerful little tricks that literally re-programme the unconscious mind into believing something else. This is what you want to do. Write down on a piece of paper a short positive instruction such as I am… or I will…or I always….

Then repeat the affirmation several times a day for 21 days. This sounds like a doctors prescription. After 21 days the mind will be programmed to believe in the affirmation. Some affirmation rules:

Keep them short and in the present tense – I am, I will
Make them positive i.e. to do something not to stop something
Keep them personal to you
Only have 10 maximum at a time

I have a nifty piece of software that blinks my affirmations on my computer screen countless times a day. I don’t see them as the blink is too quick but my unconscious mind is accepting them. This is called subliminal marketing and it was banned in the 1950’s. So don’t go doing this to your customers.

Try affirmations, they work

Anchors

Nautical term this is not. They are triggers that get your unconscious mind to leak a feeling back to your conscious mind. This affects your feelings. I’ll go out later and be bombarded by images, sounds and smells that will bring back a memory. My unconscious mind will leak this memory back to my unconscious along with a feeling about the memory.

I could hear church bells and this might remind me of my wedding day and bring back those wonderful feelings I experienced on the day. I might smell some cut grass and be reminded of having to cut my own grass at home which is something I don’t enjoy so will bring my state down. A tele-salesperson might pick up the phone to take a call and this memory might trigger a bad state. It could be that all morning he’s had some terrible calls and he’s conditioned his mind to convince himself that whenever he picks up the phone, it’s bad news.

But anchoring can help you control your state of mind. The idea is to attach something to a memory so you can re-experience the feeling that is associated with the memory.
I imagine you’ve all heard of Pavlov’s Dogs. Very famous example of dogs salivating with a ring of a bell because they associated the ring as the time when food gets delivered.

Advertisers spend millions on getting us to associate famous personalities with their product. I worked for a company recently that used June Whitfield in their advertising. There was June saying great things about the product and the viewers would watch the commercial, glance at June, get a warm feeling of security, nostalgia, integrity and then attach these feelings to the product being sold.

Very clever

Our dog Brodie loves it when she’s in the garden but loves it even more when she escapes into the Church Yard or next door to explore. Faced with a huge fence bill to ensure she didn’t escape, we opted for one of these dog training devices as it was much cheaper and would create less turmoil. I was a little sceptical at first. After all laying a wire underground around the boundary and strapping a collar on Brodie which would give her a short electric shock every time she crossed the boundary….well.

Well what can I say? And before everyone writes in to complain of animal cruelty, it didn’t turn out like that. Yes she had a couple of shocks but with a day she no longer approached the invisible boundary wire because she knew what might happen to her.
Within a week, we just put the collar on Brody and didn’t even bother to switch on the electric current. We call it the “Oweee” collar and she has never escaped once. Now this is one big anchor and Brody relates the “Oweee” collar to pain on the boundary and won’t go near there.

So we’ve produced a visible, vocal and physical touch anchor.

Now I’m not saying we should wear collars when selling, but what I am urging you to do is to set up your own series of anchors that will bring back a memory and flood your conscious mind with a feeling or two and this will affect your state.

A good friend of mine used to dread doing presentations until he went out and bought himself a special presentation suit. He self talked, ran affirmations and did loads of mental rehearsal to ensure his presentation would be good when he wore the suit. He worked hard at this and is was good. So good in fact that he only needs to put on this suit to bring back all the wonderful feelings of confidence, assuredness, relaxed state he was in when he first wore the suit.

I imagine that he would only need to think of the suit. Put a really good picture of himself in his minds eye wearing the suit and presenting well and that would be enough to bring back the positive state of mind he needs to present. I wonder what would happen to my friend if he had to buy a new suit?

So how can you set up an anchor?

You need to experience the state of mind that you want to bottle up first. Now you can wait until this state naturally happens and make the most of the moment. Or you can go back in your mind’s eye to remember a moment when you were going through that state of mind.

When you have the memory clear in your mind, really try and imagine it much more. Get in the picture; get in the zone as they say these days. Recall the sounds around you, the smells, the feelings and what you see around you.

Next put a stimulus into your conscious mind. Try and get all three senses ie visual, touch and sound. Go for taste and smell as well if you wish. For example you might press your right hand finger and thumb together, when recalling a favourite song in your head.
Repeat this as many times as you can. With Brodie it took a few “Oweee Collar” moments to anchor her. Just like our affirmations from earlier, you need to convince your unconscious mind through repetition. After a short while all you’ll need to do is fire off the anchor you created to let your unconscious just flood your mind with those lovely feelings you stored up.

Try it, it does work.

So next time you’re feeling low or negative or feeling that you can’t sell anymore, get your body active in the right way, fire off some anchors and get that self talk going to your advantage. Spend some time on your mind and remember that the unconscious mind delivers feelings but we can convince this to give us the right feelings.
After all selling is a such a topsy turvy business. You have your ups and downs and we are only humans at the end of day. Flesh and blood bristling with emotions and feelings. Learn how to control them to give you that head start on everyone else.

Paul is an international sales speaker, sales trainer, author and coach based in the UK.

He specialises in rapport selling and rapport coaching and can ignite his audiences large or small.

Sign up to my weekly eZine of sales and coaching tips and get a free report on getting the best out of 2009 plus a free hypnotic relaxation MP3 to download. www.archertraining.co.uk

01452 730276

paul@paularcher.com

Blog – www.paularcher.com

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