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by Thomas Phelps
I know what you’re thinking: “This is supposed to be an article on sales, not on psychological mumbo-jumo.” But just stay with me for four more sentences and I’ll show you why your focus has a tremendous impact on your sales performance.
Sentence One: Let’s say that you are going to spend tomorrow prospecting for business and are planning on calling 30 net-new prospects that you have never spoken to before.
Sentence Two: Since we are already assuming, let’s say that you believe that cold calling is an intrusion of your prospects time and you fully expect to be greeted as an interruption.
Sentence Three: If you stopped right before you started making your calls and began thinking, “I have some information that is very valuable and can make a very positive impact to everyone I speak with during my call-block.”
Sentence Four: If your focused shifted from you being an interruption to you having important and relevant information before you started prospecting, wouldn’t you agree that your results will be different?
When you focus on a positive instead of a negative, you free your mind and resources up so that you can better respond to customer questions, objections and buying signals. When you start from a position of strength instead of from a position of weakness, your skills and natural talents are free to shine.
How to Control Your Focus
It’s amazing how simple it is to change what you focus on and even more amazing that more people don’t already know this.
Practice Your Self-Questions
Once you start to become aware of how many questions you ask yourself in a given day, you’ll be curious about how to create a habit of asking more positive questions than negative ones. The good news is that awareness is often curative.
By this I mean that if your self-asked questions are making you focus on things that you know that will not increase the quality of your life, you will become aware of them when asked and will make you re-think the question. And, in my experience, a re-thought and re-phrased question usually results in a better, more life-enhancing question.
Lastly, let me ask you a question: “What happens when someone (or you) ask you a question?”
The answer to my question is that you answer, to the best of your abilities, the question. Pretty simple, huh? The truth is that you almost always answer a question asked of you, whether from yourself or from someone else. If the question is empowering, the answer will, most likely, be empowering.
Which produces a better answer to these self-asked questions and which will improve that which you focus on”
“Why do I have to prospect when I know that no one wants to talk to me? or “How can deliver maximum value to everyone whom I call today?”
Still don’t think that your questions determine what you focus on and that what you focus on is what you experience?
Why?
About the author