The Biggest Sales Obstacle that Impacts Sales Success!
Are you Questioning yourself on how to Attain Sustainable Growth?
Then ask yourself why Richard Branson, Leonardo DaVinci, and Mozart achieve 10,000 times more than any of us, mere mortals? Could it be luck, natural skill or something called Self-Management.
Self-Management is the art of effectively managing ourselves, something that does not come naturally. In fact, it isn’t easy as you must learn to identify your natural behavior and then consistently curb Counter-Productive Behavior.
Today you have all the opportunities in the world at your fingertips, in particular those of you who own a company. But the degree in which you attain your real goals, all hinges on your ability to identify weaknesses, deal head on with sales obstacles and consistently self-manage.
Get your Free CEO Growth Barrier Information Kit | Click Here
Identify and Remove the Top Sales Obstacles that Impact Growth with CEO Sales Tools
Business Owners and CEO's Take Actionable Steps
It begins with being completely open minded in order to identify your true strengths and weaknesses. Most Business Owners think they know what they are good at; and they are usually wrong. Business Owners can perform only from strength. You cannot build performance on weakness—therefore it is critical that you identify your weaknesses and personal sales obstacles in order to begin to curb counter-productive behavior.
Look back at your past failures. Past failures did not occur because of lack of discipline, desire or willpower. These failures often occurred because of your inability to identify what you were truly good at.
We think we know our own strengths. For example, how many times have you interviewed and hired a sales person who emphasized throughout the interviewing process, that they were a closer! Only to find out that this person’s closing ability were non-existent, or should we say, limited ….. to YOU, during the interview! Yet we continue to rely on this same hiring process despite our past failures!
Illusory Superiority and the devastating Impact to your Bottom Line: The human mind is complex and is built to trick us. Scientists and Psychologists have known this for years. It is referred to as "Illusory Superiority". It is a Cognitive Bias whereby individuals overestimate their own qualities, relative to others. Illusory superiority is often referred to as the above average effect.
Something else to take into consideration is Ego and its effect on Illusory Superiority. Egocentrism is where a Business Owner places greater importance on their own abilities, than those they manage, or from any outside influence. This is often revealed in the Business Owner,, who despite their own acknowledgement regarding poor sales performance, reject help from the outside, believing that they can resolve the problem when in fact, all they are clear on are the symptoms.
How Personal Weaknesses cross over into the Hiring Process: In many cases, a Business Owner who does most, if not all of the hiring, unknowingly and subconsciously hire sales people with similar characteristics and behavior to themselves, resulting in a corporate weakness emerging. They think “I like this guy”. When in fact, you ARE like this guy! Instead of strengthening your firm by identifying people with strengths, where you may have weakness, you in fact do the direct opposite by compounding your problem.
Charles Thomas Munger is an American businessman, lawyer, investor, and philanthropist. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, a man who Bill Gates and Warren Buffet call the smartest man alive. He says there are 25 reasons we make mistakes in judgment. He documented them in an article entitled The 25 Cognitive Biases; The Psychology of Human Misjudgment: The bias most relevant to managing ourselves he calls "Simple Psychological Denial".
Simple Psychological Denial: An example would be of a mother who continually denies that her beloved son who died in the war. Or mothers of serial killers who remain in denial years after conviction. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it or deny it until it’s bearable. We all do it to some extent, and it’s a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.
Simple Psychological Denial and the Business Owner: We here at Peak Performance see Simple Psychological Denial the moment we speak with a Business Owner. We know that the reason they made the effort to reach out to us is that they are in need of a result, not sales information, white papers or brochures, but a real result. In the initial moments of this discussion, more often than not they tell how great things are, and that they really don’t know what they would change sales specific!
Acknowledgement is the Key! It's that fear that eventually gets us, which is why courage is so critical. When you have the courage to acknowledge your situation then everything falls into place. When you operate out of fear, your business becomes a series of psychological biases, or excuses that keep you locked in a situation where your future is at best, uncertain!
The Solution: Feedback Analysis used to eliminate psychological biases. Feedback analysis replaces relying on your gut feeling regarding an outcome, with relying on an honest review of actual past successes and failures.
For example, if the sales people you have hired, based on what you believed to be a the most accurate method of recruiting and training, yet the results are lackluster at best, then an assessment of your own methodology is essential.
The Critical Importance of Self Awareness and Acknowledgment: The first step in Alcoholics Anonymous is admitting that you have a problem with alcohol. You must stand up in front of other people, often strangers and publicly say, "I admit I am powerless over alcohol—that my life has become unmanageable." They know that without clearly admitting the obvious truth, no change will occur.
Misidentifying the Problem: Most often the reason most people do not or cannot actually fix their own problems is that they misidentify the problem to start with. The first step in productive change is to first determine why things are like they are, regardless of your feelings or inevitable pain.
The one question we here at Peak Performance rely on is WHY. Regardless of the symptoms expressed by a CEO, we meet that symptom with Why.
“Why is it occurring “ | “Why is it consistent” | “Why, despite your coaching and advice do your sales reps rely on this counter- productive way of doing things”
The answers will surprise you! Most Business Owners do not know what the actual root cause of these symptoms are. This is the key to resolving your dilemma! Human tendency is to ignore the critical importance of diagnosing the weaknesses and its cause, and just try to treat the symptoms of our problems.
The Critical Importance of Diagnosing Before Prescribing: Before we begin to train, change or coach any sales team, we first access individual and group strengths and weaknesses providing us a clear understanding as to Sales specific issues that must be targeted. This allows us to develop the Sales Training Process in a way that targets Leadership, Management and Sales deficiencies providing productive support.
Peak Performance Training and Development does not rely on Blanket Training. This refers to Training Companies that believe one shoe fits all. A Doctor cannot and will not prescribe the same drug or treatment to ten different patients, right, nor should you. Our Sales Training Process Development and Targeted Coaching focuses in on the individual and group sales weaknesses, opposed to simply preaching our opinion or forcing a one size fits all approach.