How would you like to get more positive results in sales? I want to give you an exercise you can use to dramatically change the results you are currently getting.

Before I do that I need to give you a little background about how our minds work. You see your mind is a goal seeking mechanism, the most complex mechanism of its kind ever created. It will literally, bring in to existence any clearly defined end result or goal.

Now, your mind can either be an Automatic Success Mechanism or an Automatic Failure Mechanism depending on the programming it gets through your self image.

Your self image is the thermostat that determines whether you will be a success or a failure. If you have a poor self image, it doesn’t matter what kind of success goals you set, you will never be a success unless you change the image you have of your self.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are currently earning $30,000 a year in sales, and you would like to increase that to $40,000 a year. On January 1st you set a goal to earn $40,000 this year. You get excited and you go to work to achieve it.

Everything is going along wonderfully, you start making sales, and by the end of the first quarter you have closed $10,000 in business. You’re right on target. However, something is going on inside of you. Maybe you start to get a little nervous, you begin to doubt, your self talk is maybe something like, “this is too good to be true”. Or maybe you aren’t aware of what’s going on inside because you’re working on autopilot.

You see if you haven’t consciously done any thing to raise your self image, in your mind you are still a $30,000 a year salesperson. So what happens? The thermostat in your mind makes an adjustment and next quarter you only close $5,000. So by mid year you are right on track to what your $30,000 a year self image thermostat is set at.

There are proven documented examples of this. One company, took a $50,000 a year salesman, put him in the best market in the country and at the end of one year he earned $50,000. They took the same salesman; put him in the worst market in the country, and at the end of one year he earned $50,000.

You see, you can’t perform at a higher level than what your self image believes you deserve.

Now let me explain what is happening in your mind and how to change it. Your mind works in pictures. If you closed your eyes right now and pictured your car, a friend, the place you live, you would see a picture of what ever you focused on seeing.

Now close your eyes and see a picture of you as a salesperson. What do you see?

The picture you see is based on the beliefs you have about your self and how you will perform in any given sales situation. To change the results you are currently getting you must change the picture.

How do you change the picture from a $30,000 a year salesperson to a $40,000 a year salesperson? By imagining your self as a $40,000 a year salesperson. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is something called role playing, and if you let it, it may help you to double your sales.

What is role playing?

(Quoted from Charles B. Roth’s out of print book, How to Make $25,000 a Year Selling)

“Well it is simply imagining yourself in various sales situations, then solving them in your mind until you know what to say and what to do whenever the situation comes up in real life.

The reason why it accomplishes so much is that selling is simply a matter of situations.

One is created every time you talk to a customer. He says something or asks a question or raises an objection. If you always know how to counter what he says or answer his question or handle the objection, you make sales…

A role-playing salesman, at night when he is alone, will create these situations. He will imagine the prospect throwing the wildest kind of curves at him. Then he will work out the best answer to them…

No matter what the situation is, you can prepare for it before-hand by means of imagining yourself and your prospect face to face while he is raising objections and creating problems and you are handling them properly.”

I’m sure at some point in your sales career you have done some role-playing in a classroom, seminar, or at a sales meeting. By taking that type of role-playing and moving it in to your mind, you can progress from fumbling to perfection and success. You can then rehearse repetitively until it becomes “second nature” and your real selling experiences will mirror those practiced perfectly in your imagination.

If you are seriously interested in achieving greater sales success I challenge you to take some time this week to do this exercise.