Simmering Self Motivation

I love taking my dog Brodie for walks. The enjoyment she gets from bounding round the fields, poking her nose in all the rabbit holes, chasing shadows.

Brodie loves walks, she adores scampering across the fields and digging up rabbit runs. She chases pheasants and her tail is wagging all the time.

However when demanding that she goes to bed in her kennel is another thing. She just doesn’t want to do it. Eventually she will but with great reluctance.

Being a salesperson can be the same really. We love chatting to customers, finding out their needs and presenting solutions. But ask us to make a cold call or to chase up a case that needs plenty of patience and we go cold.

Likewise if you’ve had a series of bad results, figures are down and you’ve not reached your target this month. Now your motivation can drop through the floor and the effort of just making a call seems immense and not very rewarding.

Now as salespeople we need to be self motivated. Brodie will go for a walk because she wants to, but get her to do something she doesn’t want to do, and she puts up a fuss. Salespeople need simmering self motivation all the time so we can continue to do the hard things willingly and not just do the parts of the job we get enjoyment from. In the same way we need motivation to carry on when the chips are down, with the full belief we are doing the right thing.

Easier said than done. So I’ve got 3 secrets to share with you

Mental Rehearsal

When I was younger I lost my two front teeth when playing rugby. That makes me sound good but actually I fell over whilst running in my garden when I was 12 and lost both front teeth. Anyway I’ve got to go to the dentist shortly for some implant work to be done which will involve a couple of years of operations. Now I can just imagine the pain and discomfort I’m gong to go through. The sound of that piercing drill, the smell of burning enamel, the taste of the mouth wash they give you….

What I’m doing is mental rehearsal but completely the wrong way around. But this is the way many of us operate. We dread something so we don’t get let down. And when it turns out horrible we were right.

99% of Olympic athletes rehearse their discipline regularly. Yes they do it physically but they do it mentally too. Research has shown that when you combine physical practise with mental practise, you get more success on the running track.

Studies have shown this many times.

I remember the old Soviet Union and eastern block countries such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia used to do so well at the Olympic Games compared to the western nations. The USSR would always win the medals table and we all blamed it on their drugs and brutal physical training. Secretly they were practising new methods of motivation and performance.

Nowadays all athletes use them and one of them was mental rehearsal. In 1980 the Soviets did an experiment. A bunch of athletes were divided up into 4 teams and told how to train. Team one just did physical traditional preparation, team two did monthly physical preparation and a little bit of mental rehearsal. Team three did more mental rehearsal than physical rehearsal and team four did far more mental than physical.

At the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980 guess which team improved the most? You got it – team four.

So what is mental rehearsal? It builds on visualisation which allows you to picture the scene of whatever it is you’re preparing for. But mental rehearsal lets you turn up the volume control, the colour control button, lets in smells and feelings and gets the whole action moving. A complete re-enactment of the whole activity.

So you’ve got a big presentation to do or a really important sales meeting which just so has to go well. So you mentally rehearse in your minds eye exactly what you want to happen. You see it like a panoramic colour movie as vivid as you can. Hear the sounds, see the people, their expressions as strong as you are able. Make the movie go your way. If you want success then just imagine it.

How does this work? Quite unashamedly, the brain can’t see the difference between real life and vivid imagery. Do it often enough and you influence your unconscious mind. And of course, it’s the unconscious mind that leaks back feelings to your conscious. The feelings will be confidence, assuredness and eagerness. These are pretty handy states to have when faced with a major presentation.

You can do this in the car, in front of a mirror, in bed at night…pretty much anywhere.
Pssst…don’t tell anyone though. Keep it a secret.

Goals Board

Now the setting of goals deserves a whole chapter on its own. What I’m suggesting here is something to give you simmering motivation. Yes setting clearly defined and written goals broken down into long to short term, is absolutely essential to every salesperson. But here’s a nifty idea. It’s called a Goal Board.

Right now in my office, stuck up on the wall is my goal board. On it there are a number of press cuttings, drawings, photographs, pictures which vividly illustrate my goals. I have a press photo of a fit looking guy running in the snow (one of my goals is related to fitness. This one is a very long term goal and one day I’ll get there!). I also have a picture of a cottage on the Cornish coastline, a photo of my family enjoying the seaside in France, where I enjoy my vacations. Some drawings done by my children to show what I do what I do for.

Just glancing at this board can give me a good injection of self motivation as it reminds me where I’m going and what I’m striving for. The bigger picture if you like.

Self Motivation System

I was given this idea a few years ago and it also reminds me of a great way of promoting a service or product in a commercial or advertisement.

Do you remember seeing the Honda car commercial where every part of the car was joined together in one giant marble run. This commercial showed us vividly what makes a car and the precision engineering that will join all the parts together to make the finished item.

A local dry cleaning firm had a poster done up and leaflets showing vividly the processes involved in dry cleaning a suit. Just to show the paying public exactly what value they are getting.

As salespeople our profession is not so different. To get to the finished article i.e. a sale, we have to go through countless steps to get there. Prospecting, making the appointment, building rapport, asking questions. The list goes on but our problem is that we only reward ourselves when we have a sale. That’s what we’re targeted on and rewarded on so it’s understandable why we do this.

The Self Motivation System attempts to break down this series of events into major milestones along the way to a successful sale.

So you could award yourself points for each milestone on a sliding scale. So for making an appointment to go and see a well qualified potential customer you earn 3 points. For securing a second presentation meeting with the customer you get 5 points and for each sale you make award more points. If you are able to multi sell various products to the same customer, give yourself even more points.

What gets measured gets done.

The point behind this is to reward yourself when you hit points not the sale at the end. You don’t have to nip down to Woolworths and buy yourself the biggest Toblerone Bar you can find, you can just pat yourself on the back as a good job done.

So even if you haven’t made a sale for a few days it doesn’t matter because you’ve made lots of a appointments or second meetings which will eventually filter into sales.
You become self motivated yourself.

Try it – it does work.

There’s three ways you can simmer your self confidence. Just like a good winter broth, it needs to simmer on the Aga for several days, so let these new ideas simmer away in you and soon become a habit you do every day.
Every journey starts with a single step.

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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