3 Attitudes Of Top Salespeople

First of all, top salespeople are ambitious. They are hungry. They really want to be successful. They see themselves as capable of being the best in their field. They are determined to get into the top 20 percent of their professions and then into the top 10 percent. They know that anything that anyone else is that they can do as well. Top salespeople believe that they deserve to be the best and to enjoy the rewards that go with sales success. The word deserve comes from two Latin words meaning from service. They know that they fully deserve anything that they can attain, from serving others, from helping their customers to acquiring products and services that can improve their lives and work. Top salespeople see their ability to sell and their sales results as steppingstones to higher achievement and to financial success. Consequently, they set high standards for themselves. They are determined to get better and better and to sell more and more. And this must be your goal as well.

The second attitude of quality that leads to optimism and sales success is courage. Top salespeople are courageous. They work continually to confront the fears, especially the fears of failure and rejection that hold most people back.

“Vincent van Gogh once said the key to success is for you to make a habit throughout your life. I\’m doing the things you fear.”

“Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Make a habit throughout your life of doing the things you fear. If you do the thing you fear, the death of fear is certain the average person evades and avoids the things that he or she fears.”

The superior salesperson, on the other hand, turns toward the fear and confronts it. Are you afraid of prospecting? Then force yourself to prospect by telephone and personally over and over again until the fear eventually disappears. The primary reason that salespeople underachieve, and fail is the fear of rejection—the fear of calling on strangers. You can overcome this fear by realizing that rejection is not personal. No one can\’t reject you as a person. They can merely reject your initial approach with a new product or service. No one knows you well enough to reject you as an individual. It\’s not personal.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle once said the way to develop a quality, if you have it not, is to act on every occasion where the quality is required as if you had it already.

The way to become fearless in your selling activities is to act in every respect as if you were fearless already. The more courageous and confident you become, the more optimistic you will be, and the more positive your attitude will be.

The third attitude or quality of top salespeople is commitment. Top salespeople are totally committed to their companies as our top business owners. They\’re committed to their products and services, to their customers, and to themselves. They make a 100 percent wholehearted commitment to doing what they do and to doing it well.

Perhaps the most important word in selling is the word caring. Customers today are more sophisticated and demanding than ever, and they will buy only from someone whom they feel really cares about them and their situation. The more committed you are to what you are selling, the more you care about other people, the more you care about them and how your product or service can help them to improve their lives or work. The easier it becomes for you to sell. Caring translates into enthusiasm, and selling has often been called a transfer of enthusiasm. When the enthusiasm you feel for the goodness of what you sell transfers to your customer, the sale is complete. You never see top salespeople who merely dabble in their professions. They are totally committed to the importance and value of what they do. They start a little earlier, work a little harder, stay a little later. They learn their product and service information inside and out. And when they sell, they sell wholeheartedly so that their customers experience their confidence and enthusiasm and are moved more readily to buying.

Join the winner\’s circle in selling. Develop the winning edges in your profession, especially develop the attitude and personality of the happiest, highest performing people in your field. Be positive, optimistic, and confident. Be ambitious for yourself and your business. Set high standards for what you can accomplish. Develop the quality of courage by acting in every situation where you might feel nervous and unsure as to if it were impossible to fail.

“As Emerson advised, Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.”

Commit yourself wholeheartedly to the profession of selling to being the very best and to doing the very best job possible. Make it clear to your customers that you really care about helping them to improve their lives and work. Now, selling has changed dramatically in the last few years, and you have to change as well if you want to maximize your sales.

In the 50s and 60s, customers were relatively unsophisticated. The selection of products and services was limited. The salesperson was more knowledgeable than the customer. As a result, the entire emphasis in selling was on the sales approach and sales methodology on talking people into buying. Sales in the past were based on the idea model, an idea which stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. The salesperson said something to get the customer\’s attention aroused interest by explaining the features of the product or service aroused by desire, by explaining benefits, and then called for action and closed the sale.

By the 1970s, customers had become far more knowledgeable, sophisticated, experienced, and demanding. The requirements for effective selling shifted from the old model to the new model of selling. The key to understanding the new model of selling is realizing that relationships are more important now than anything else in professional selling and in building your business.