More often than not you meet the people you are selling to over the phone for the initial encounter. You don’t know what they look like, you don’t know what type of personality they have and you don’t know what kind of mood they happen to be in. Nor do they know any of that about you. All you have to go on is a voice and the personality that voice exudes. Both you and the prospect will immediately make judgments based on the sound and tone of yours and their voice.
If you come off as upbeat and enthusiastic you have a much better chance of becoming likeable in the mind of a complete stranger; a stranger who might even acknowledge that he or she is in the process of being ‘prospected’. What this requires is a proactive approach to evaluate yourself from an outsiders perspective. Questions like, do I sound tired or lackadaisical when I’m having my conversations? Am I monotone, or should come off a little livelier? Do I need to smile more while I am having a conversation? Along with the knowledge for what you’re selling, the only other tool you really have is your voice. Before you start your day, acknowledge that there really shouldn’t be any reason for you NOT to be happy and even though working the phones can be a grind, don’t let that bring your mojo down. Admit the fact that you will always have problems. Now either decide to empower the problems or work through them the best that you can and move on with your day.
If you had to list out the traits of a successful person, optimism should surely land in the fore front. Optimistic people tend to handle adversity well and are able to squash a bad situation before it has a chance to leverage any control. They won’t over think their actions to the point where it becomes inaction and they don’t have crazy, predetermined notions that conjure far fetched “worst case” scenarios. People that underachieve tend to let the little things get to them and ruin any chance for progress. They’ll often feel like victims and have excuses for why things aren’t going their way. Without a strong sense of optimism, you can let one bad event, or even one bad phone call, snowball into a completely unproductive day. And that could snowball into a bad week and if the bad weeks add up then that just turns to misery. Don’t ever let yourself slip as far as having a “bad day” because of one single event. A day last 24 hours and most of the negative events last seconds or minutes at most. So why give these events the power to consume even more of your time?
It’s not a phenomenon that humans are naturally drawn to happy and optimistic people, and the same applies to the sales world. If you can honestly admit that you’re doing your best then good things will result. But if you let trivial events drown out your thoughts, you’ll only be held back in life and I guarantee it will resonate in your voice when you’re trying to talk and sell to new people. The great part about waking up each day is that it’s never too late to make a change and to better yourself; whether it is your approach at your sales job or with life in general: Stay Optimistic! You’ll find it requires a lot less work and a lot less of your energy. Is your sales glass half empty or half full?
