The Fear of Asking for the Sale

February 23, 2017

How to Get Over Your Fear of Asking for the Sale

As a business owner, selling is integral to your everyday life, or at least it should be if you ever intend to make money.

Without even realizing it, we are ‘selling’ a hundred times throughout the day.

These are some examples of when we are selling ourselves or our ideas:

• Trying to engage and encourage our staff to buy into our systems
• Convincing clients to use our services
• Persuading clients to follow our advice
• And even convincing friends to go see a particular movie

Despite the regularity of selling we do every day, most of us are still terrified at the idea of selling.

Here Are Some Strategies to Employ if the Idea of Selling Makes Your Blood Run Cold:

1. Recognize that selling is just a transfer of enthusiasm

Sales is often called “the transfer of enthusiasm.” The more enthusiastic and excited you are, the greater your ability to convince your prospect that they will benefit from your recommendation.

Provided that you are offering a high-quality product that’s appropriate for a prospect, being enthusiastic shouldn’t be a problem, and your prospect will feed on your enthusiasm.

To become excited about the transaction, come up with a list of reasons that your product will benefit the client, and share those benefits with clients as you describe how their experience will alter after the transaction.

Focusing on these benefits for the client, rather than the features of the product, will allow you to maintain enthusiasm as you share the genuine benefits they will experience.

2. Learn to deactivate the subconscious scripts

From a young age we are taught very specific beliefs around work, money, people and so on. More often than not these ‘lessons’ don’t serve us positively in a sales environment.

If you think about these lessons you were perhaps taught as a child, they may include: “don’t talk to strangers,” “never discuss money,” or even “selling is crass” and so on.

Regardless of whether you sense these or not, these mental scripts are running through your head. If you begin to hear these these scripts, make a conscious effort to deactivate them.

3. Remove your fear of failure

Failure isn’t fatal, but fear of failure is paralyzing. The most experienced sales people know that they won’t have a 100 percent success rate, but newcomers often feel like not closing a deal could mean the end of the world.

Rather than worrying about the result, learn to follow the process. Use your sales script and trust in the knowledge that if you do the right things, then the right result will happen.

Before anything else, sales is a numbers game. The more experienced you become, the greater your conversion ratio will be, and at that point you know exactly how many closes you need in order to achieve your income goals.

4. Don’t worry about appearing pushy

A lot of business owners worry that they will come across as a cheap and pushy salesman if they are trying to close a deal. This stems largely from our internal scripts about selling, so we must continue to work on those.

The real clincher for this fear is to ask yourself two questions:
1. Do you genuinely believe that your product or service is beneficial for your clients?
2. Do you believe you are the best person to help them with this issue?

If you can answer “yes” to both of those questions, then it is entirely your responsibility to help them identify that this is the right thing for them. Share your enthusiasm and the reasons why you think they will benefit from your product.

5. Understand that sales is both a science and an art

There are very specific reasons for and ways of achieving a sale, and understanding that it is a process and building these steps into your sales sequence helps you remain unemotional about your sales results.

Each time you make a sale or a deal doesn’t close, review your process. Did you follow the steps? Did you forget a part of the process? And so on.

Identifying the key aspects of a sale and training yourself to comprehensively follow the steps will dramatically improve your results and remove any fear of the unknown.

6. Practice. Practice. Practice.

Sales is about more than being able to talk quickly, or speak over your prospects. Often it requires charisma, personality, humor, influence and a degree of persuasion. Pulling all of these aspects into a conversation, along with the scripts, can be a challenge for newcomers to sales.

Regular practice and role play will aid the delivery of your sales pitch and your subsequent ability to deliver it with your natural flair and personality, making asking for the sale easier.

Be sure to practice on friends, colleagues and peers – don’t let your first few rounds be with your prospects.

Having the basic components in place before you speak to a prospect allows you to enter a real sales conversation, confident in your ability to deliver an appropriate and effective proposal and help to eliminate the fear of asking for the sale.

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