When you interact with a confident sales person, all kinds of positive things happen on both sides of the transaction.
Sensing a humble confidence, consumers will start to let down their guard and reveal the true nature of their wants and needs.
Feeling confident frees salespeople to take more risk and find creative solutions. During face-to-face interactions, they’re more empathetic to the customers because they worry less about being self-conscious.
As long as confidence doesn’t crossover into arrogance, it’s a win-win solution for both sides of the transactions.
How do you teach confidence?
Mark Manson, a popular blogger/author recently wrote an insightful article on this topic. The original post is quite edgy, but one of the new aggregators did a good job of toning it down and still capturing the meaning.
Here are some of Mark’s important points.
What Doesn’t Create Confidence
Mark points out that most people have the false belief that confidence is connected to positive external circumstance.
Just because somebody has something (tons of friends, a million dollars, a beach body) doesn’t necessarily mean that this person is confident in it. There are tycoons who totally lack confidence in their own wealth, models who lack confidence in their looks, and celebrities who lack confidence in their own popularity.
Also, there is a false belief that confidence can be ginned up through positive thinking or tricking yourself into believing you’re better than you really are. This is also a dead-end road.
[Some people think] confidence is a feeling. It’s a state of mind. It’s the perception that you lack nothing. That you are equipped with everything you need, both now and for the future….
But this sort of thinking—believing you’re already beautiful even though you’re a frumpy slob, or believing you’re a raving success even though you [have no business track record]—leads to the kind of insufferable narcissism that causes people to argue that obesity (something that is more detrimental to your health than smoking cigarettes) should be celebrated as beauty….
What Does Create Confidence
If great external circumstance and positive thinking are both ineffective, what does work?
The big charade with confidence is that it has nothing to do with the comfort of what we achieve and everything to do with the comfort of what we don’t achieve.
People who are confident in business are confident because they’re comfortable with failure.
People who are confident in their social lives are confident because they’re comfortable with rejection.
People who are confident in their relationships are confident because they’re comfortable with getting hurt.
The truth is that the route to the positive runs through the negative. Those among us who are the most comfortable with negative experiences are those who reap the most benefits.
It’s counterintuitive, but it’s also true.
If you want to teach your agents to be confident, you have to first teach them to be comfortable with failure. It’s the only reliable source of confidence. It also has the added benefit of teaching humility.
In the world of sales (and in life), confidence combined with humility is remarkably effective.
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