The Psychology of Sales

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s session, The Psychology of Sales. This webinar is exclusively for Lead Forensics customers and is part of our wider Customer Academy program which is designed to help our customers with any pain points that they might be experiencing across marketing, sales and the Lead Forensics products itself.

My name is Steph and I will be hosting today and we are so lucky to have Stephen Tierney as our guest speaker today. Stephen is the Director of Sales Training here at Lead Forensics and has over 20 years experience as a sales trainer and a life coach. A professional sportsman, qualified in psychology and human excellence, as well as the founder of Mindcell Sales Training makes Stephen the perfect speaker for today’s topic.

Steph: Hi Stephen.

Stephen: Hello Steph, how are you?

Steph: I’m good, how are you?

Stephen: I’m good, very good and live here in Arizona.

Steph: Great! Stephen is in Arizona today and I am in the Portsmouth office, so we are really hoping that this goes well with both of us on the opposite sides of the world. Okay, so before I pass you over to Stephen there’s just some housekeeping I need to do.

We use the GoTo webinar platform to host our webinars and this allows you to submit questions at any point in today’s session, it’s simple to do. If you are a regular attendee of our webinars you’ll know there is always an opportunity at the end of the session for Q&As and today is no exception. We scheduled approximately 10 minutes to answer these, we’ll do our best to keep to our timekeeping schedule so we can answer as many of your questions live as possible. .

The last part of my housekeeping is that there is a survey at the end of the webinar and we would love to get your feedback. So tell us what information was useful, if there was anything we missed and you would have liked more detail on and also tell us any future topics you would like us to cover. Remember our webinars and the academy are designed for you and we really want you to get the absolute most from these sessions. Also for your quick note, available for your downloads are the slides from today’s presentation so you can take them away with you.

Okay, let’s move on to the agenda Stephen, where do we start?

Stephen: Okay, excellent. So we are going to cover a lot today and this is what gets me really excited, talking about human performance and the psychology behind everything. There’s a lot to cover on this webinar so we’re going to talk about how we feed our mind and how that affects our performance. We’re also going to talk about being a professional at your work.

I used to work with sports players and when you are a professional athlete, people don’t realise there are a lot of similarities to actually being in work and being a professional salesman, for example or a professional businessman or a professional manager. So we are going to talk about being professional at your work. We’re also going to talk about how you can get rid of negative thoughts, plus much more and the Q&A, so shall we dive in?

Steph: Yeah, I just want to double check that everything is working, very quick first. So can you submit your name and where you are in the world just to let me know you can hear me in the UK, you hear Stephen in the US and let me know where you are from. I’m just going to pop you guys open….Joey in Barcelona, hi ! Caroline in the UK, hello! Lives in Skipton, Meg in Chicago….you are going so fast, excellent, thanks guys! That’s brilliant, everyone can hear us Stephen, so over to you.

Stephen: Excellent, let’s dive in. So before we get started, Steph is going to show you a slide in a second which will just show you a set of words and I just want you to take a split second to read that and then we are going to take it away again. Steph can you just show that for a split second please?

OPPORTUNITYISNOWHERE

So when you see that, what is the first thing you see? We’ll just flash it up once more for our listeners.

OPPORTUNITYISNOWHERE

And then take it away.

The very first thing that most people see is ‘Opportunity is nowhere’ and I’m not sure what you saw there but most people see that. In fact every time that we do this exercise, over 80% of people will see ‘Opportunity is nowhere’.

Now the thing is it can actually say ‘Opportunity is now here’, so why do so many people see the negative first? The only other place that I’ve done this actual test and they got something different was when I was in Scotland at the time and it was snowing outside and someone said they say ‘Opportunity is snow here’. We are always influenced by our surroundings and so why do we see the negative first? If you think about it logically, we have the news which affects our negativity. We even have alerts on our phones of news now of negative stuff, negative stuff in the newspapers, even negative people that we work with sometimes….a lot of people like to moan. So a lot of the time we are surrounded by negativity and we actually don’t even realise it, including ourselves. How many of our listeners get up in the morning, maybe this morning and said “I’m really, really tired. Oh I’m so drained.” We are all guilty of programming ourselves negatively.

I want to just touch on that here for a second. I’m just wondering if you know how many thoughts we have on a daily basis? This is both conscious thoughts and unconscious thoughts, not only the thoughts that you say “oh this is good, I’m going to write that down” but actually unconscious thoughts coming and going through your mind. Scientists say that the amount we have on average is around 50,000 thoughts per day.

Now I always ask salespeople or people that I’m working with how many do you think that scientists said were negative? What percentage do you think would be negative? It’s interesting because they say about 60 or 70%. We’re going to go on the positive side of things and say 60%. Now if you actually relate that to the amount of thoughts, that’s actually about 30,000 thoughts. Negative thoughts per day. This is an interesting thing to start thinking about. Are you controlling your thoughts or do they control you? It’s an interesting concept to think about.

I want you to think about this, if you hired a coach and all they did was feed you with negative comments, not even 30,000 let’s say 30 negative comments to start with. It wouldn’t take you long before you decided to get them out of your life would it? So why do we do it to ourselves?

The thing is when we look in the mirror there is a saying that says, we are either our best friend or our worst enemy. They say that you are looking at your best friend or your worst enemy. We are our biggest critic, if you think about it. There is nobody on this earth that is going to criticise us as much as we criticise yourself. What are you seeing when you look into that mirror to yourself? Are you building that person or are you breaking that person? Are you complimenting or are you complaining? Interesting thoughts. The biggest thing is that there’s a thing that is going on in our heads and therapists call this Thought Drama. They call all of this battle within your mind Thought Drama. We all have self doubts, we criticise ourself, we have lack of belief or lack of confidence. Who are you not to be the best salesperson in the world? Who are you not to be the best salesperson in your business?

Most of us live in reactive mode and a lot of businesses I speak to live in reaction mode. Let’s take individuals first of all. Individuals live in reactions with pains, with worries, with immediate gratification. You get instant gratification of messages on your phone, of emails but we also live in reactive mode with other people’s demands….emails, managers asking us for things. If you live in reaction, if your business is very reactive and let’s say you have managers who are reactive, then you may find yourself getting really tired in the evenings. That’s what happens when you live a life of reactiveness, you become very tired in the evenings. Another thing that is a sign of being very reactive you may know yourself that you are working very hard and working all hours under the sun but if someone were to turn around and say to you “what did you do yesterday?” …..you can’t tell them! And your mind goes blank. That is a classic example of living in reaction. We’ll talk about this a little bit later because I want people to become a little bit more proactive, than reactive and it will really help you in your sales and in your business.

The other big question is you shouldn’t be asking yourself what am I getting? The question is what am I becoming? The big question isn’t what am I getting paid here? The big question is what am I becoming here?

I heard Jim Rowen say one time that income does not far exceed personal development. This really stood out for me because if you think about it, if you are one of these people who really works on yourself and really works on your personal development, you buy programs, you read books, you watch videos and everything is about getting yourself that little percentage better. Then we find that people’s personal development moves up and their income moves up. Sometimes this can take a lucky jump in income but it’s been said that it really doesn’t exceed the level of personal development that you are doing.

Here’s another thing that he mentioned. He said that if you had to split all the money in the world evenly, right now between everyone. Within a year or two most of it would be back in the hands of the same people who had it. Isn’t that an interesting thought. So what would the main cause of this be? I’ll prewarn people here Steph, if we have any vegetarians or vegans for the next slide. So if we can just bring that up….lovely english sausages there, there you go. There is a reason for showing you these by the way.

It’s about this sausage machine theory. If you ever seen the machine that makes these types of sausages, it’s not the prettiest thing in the world. At one end you have a big container that you put all your stuff into and at the other end you’ve got a thin skin pulled over where the sausage meat goes through and they tie them up one after the other, link them together to make a chain of sausages. Why am I talking about sausage machines and a psychology of sales webinar ? Let me tell you this. Think about the sausage machine for a second and you don’t mind Steph I will use you on this, yeah?

Steph: Yeah of course.

Stephen: Excellent. So Steph, if you want to make vegetarian sausages what are you going to put in one side?

Steph: Veggie sausages? Quorn mince perhaps?

Stephen: Yeah probably, corn, vegetables, etc. Now if you wanted to make pork sausages what would you put in?

Steph: Pork mince.

Stephen: You got it. No trick questions here. Here’s the funny thing about it. If you look at the sausage machine as success. Think about that for a second here. People demand success but they are putting in all the wrong type of stuff and yet they expect success to come out the other end. So you will get people who will put in busyness, stress, worry, lack of full effort, putting things off, immediate gratification and yet at the other end they expect success to come out of that.

The key to this is what are you feeding your mind and expecting success to come out the other end? It’s a bit like give me the heat from the flames and then I’ll feed it some firewood and that’s the way a lot of people live.

If you are listening to this webinar today, I want you to be aware of what you are feeding your mind daily and expecting success to come out the other side? What are you going to put in your sausage machine tomorrow? Look at what you want and look at what you need to put in. If you want success you need to think about putting in success, putting in the ingredients that make success. So let’s have a look at that.

Just like you wouldn’t expect putting in turkey and getting out pork sausages. I want you to have a look at this for a second here. So we’ve got our thoughts to start with, so let’s feed our thoughts. Some people will feed it with poor management, they will complain about the way the managers are running them and their business. They will complain about the style of the manager, he doesn’t understand and all they do is complain. They will also join in negativity. Now we are all guilty of this joining in negativity, you’ll see them at the water machine and someone is moaning about something and we kind of join in. I think especially in the UK, we like to join in. They will also feed in tiredness, they will get up in the morning and say they are knackered and really run down today. A lot of people in the UK will say “how are you feeling?” and a lot of people will say “not bad”. The mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s visually imagined and what’s real and if you’re saying “not bad”, it can’t negate the “not”, so it’s just hearing “bad”. We feed in hate, hate others and what they’ve got and hate the treatment they get, is it preferential treatment? They hate certain things about their job. They complain about not earning enough, dollars or pounds and they are feeding this into their mind. Another classic sales thing is they will complain about poor leads. They will complain about the quality of the leads and how poor they are.

And yet all of this…. poor management, joining in negativity, tired, run down, hate, not earning enough, poor leads. They are feeding this into their mind and expecting results out of the other side. What is the result we are going to get if we feed that in? It’s going to be poor. The results are going to be poor, there is no way that we can feed that into our mind and get out successful results.

What should we do then? Let’s have a look at that, let’s rewind it back and if we look at putting in positive words. Mantras to yourself. What do I mean by a mantra? When I was in sales I used to have this mantra that I would say to myself at the start of the day and it was, “I close deals” “I close deals, that’s what I do. I close deals, that’s what I do”. I just kept saying it, “I close deals. I close deals”. I used to have it up on my screensaver and I used to say things like that. That is a positive mantra. Positive words. The first step is being aware of what you are telling yourself.

The second one is don’t entertain negativity, especially if you are a leader out there. Have the rule set that in your team you do not entertain any negativity, it doesn’t come into the team. If you are a team member, you join with these rules. Not entertaining negativity is a big one.

Then comes the mindset and thoughts of mastering your craft. We will get into more of this when we touch on the sports side of things. Elite sports players don’t care about the opposition, they care about mastering their craft. We should look at that in sales and management, we should look at how we are getting each day and how we can master our craft and become the very best at it. I always remember Mohammed Ali saying when he was getting interviewed on TV and the chap said to him “if you weren’t a boxer what would you have been?” and he leaned forward and he said “it doesn’t matter, even if I was a garbage man, I would be the best garbage man in the world”. That’s all about your mindset, mastering your craft.

Healthy….number one are we eating healthy, are we staying well hydrated, are we doing the right things, are we having fitness in our lives, are we working out? The body needs to carry the mind so are you feeding it the right things?

Having a growth mindset, maybe this is for another webinar but there is having a growth mindset and a having mindset that doesn’t help you in growing. The growth mindset always looks at things like you’re winning or you’re learning. It’s about being in control of your thoughts and not having them control you.

Maximise the leads, it doesn’t matter on the quality of the leads. People say that oh come on Stephen it does matter, it does. Okay, let’s put it this way, if you are an elite poker player you probably more than likely, more often get through a few rounds to the final stages. That is not because you always got the best hands in poker, it’s because you maximised every hand possible that you had. That’s what I say to salespeople, you need to maximise every hand possible instead of complaining about the lead, maximise the lead and then whatever the result falls into it, it will fall into it.

When you feed all that into your mind, the results that you are going to get are going to be good. They are going to be great results, you’ve got to. You cannot continue to do all of this stuff, feeding your mind with the right things and matching the poor results feeding it all the negative stuff.

Let’s have a look at the next slide here. There is nothing that can trouble you as much in life as your own thoughts. I say to people the battle is not with the leads that you’ve got and the battle is not with your manager and the battle is not with your job and the battle is not with the tools that you have, the battle is in your mind. That is the battle you have to win before you start thinking you can go on to anything else. The battle is in your mind. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to win that battle in your mind and that battle you win in your mind, if you whip it in your mind, you can whip it in real life….and you will find success.

Let’s take a look at what it really means to be a professional in your work. I’ve just pulled up here the definition of a professional. The main thing for me is, it’s a person engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation rather than as a pastime. So for example, a professional boxer. But this is what really sticks out for me, one’s main paid occupation. So if you are in sales or you are a leader or you’re a business owner and this is your main paid occupation, then you should be treating that like a professional because you are a professional salesperson or a professional manager. You have to think of it like that and you will see this slide that is up here now, these are some top sports players, elite sports players from around the world…….Lebron James, tennis player Serena Williams and Rory Mcilroy.

These are elite, elite players. If you take Serena Williams for example, I’m sure that she works on a growth mindset, I’m sure she works at mastering her craft. I’m sure, we’ve seen it in documentaries that Lebron James, best in the world at basketball, still to this day masters his craft. The same with Rory Mcilroy, so any elite sportsman that you look at is a person that masters their craft, that works at their game. What I found in my background in sports, I had the pleasure of playing on a daily basis with a 7 times world champion, Steven Hendry, when I was back as a professional snooker player and what I noticed with these players was they didn’t worry about who they were playing, they weren’t worried about the tournament or the opposition, they were consistanting looking at getting better at their own game. And that’s what they focus on so there is a big, big difference there.

Let me show you another thing that these champions do. These champions make their choices through standards and goals not through emotions and feelings. This is a big one. This could really change your life. Make your choices through standards and goals, not through emotions and feelings. Now, let me just explain that for a bit.

If you decide you are going to get up in the morning and go to the gym and if it’s in the UK and it’s pretty cold, there’s a storm outside and it’s raining. The thing that you want to do most is switch the alarm off and go back to bed, you are under those nice warm covers, you don’t want to get up in that cold and wind and trek yourself to the gym and do a workout. If you just get back into bed then you are making a decision through your emotion and your feelings at the time and not through the stands you want to set for yourself and the goals. It’s about the days when you don’t feel up for it, that you have to do it.

Take that into your work environment as well. If you go to work and don’t feel up for it, that is when you need to dig in and be an elite person. I want you to start thinking about making your choices through your standards and goals not through your emotions and feelings

The key thing about this is that it won’t be easy at the start, you’ll have a lot of hard decisions but what that does is, it helps you build self-discipline and that’s key to success as well.

Steph: I’m just going to launch a pole for you now because we are very interested to see if you are making your choices through these standards and goals that Stephen was talking about or through your emotions and feelings. So be totally honest. I know I personally definitely through emotions and feelings.

Stephen: A lot of us do.

Steph: Yes, it’s interesting to see 58% at the moment are agreeing with me on emotions and feelings. So just let us know are you making your choices through those standards and goals at the moment or are you making them through emotions and feelings. Okay it looks like most of you have done it and you will see on your screen I’m sharing the poll results. It ended, Stephen, 42% on standards and goals and 58% on emotions and feelings, are you surprised?

Stephen: No actually because I think we all have times when we make the decisions on both. We are all guilty of making decisions on emotions and feelings and we also sometimes make them on our standards and goals. It’s about making more of them on your standards and goals rather than often emotions and feelings take over. No it doesn’t surprise me, that’s a good poll.

Steph: Lovely, thanks for taking part everybody. Back over to you Stephen.

Stephen: Okay, so if we just go on to the next slide, let’s have a look at what makes your standard average people then. What I like to call the 95%ers. What they do, the 95%ers are often unclear on what they really want. They don’t have a clear vision to start with, which doesn’t help. What happens is, they just go through the motions. It’s what I like to call the drifters in life, they just drift through life, they don’t actually set their goals, set their intentions which we will come on to in a second. They just drift through life. There’s an old Roman philosopher called Seneca who has a book called the Shortness of Life and he said people talk about life being really short, it’s actually really, really long it’s just that we waste most of it. I want you to think about that because that really hit home for me, it’s true we do waste a lot of it. .

So the other thing is that they don’t set daily intentions. Don’t get this mixed up with goal setting.
Goal setting is a completely different thing because daily intentions could just be done in the moment. You can set your intention to….. my intention here is to give all the energy I’ve got for this webinar and deliver a really good webinar. That is an intention set. Salespeople can come in in the morning and can just set a quick intention and really deliver that to themselves so it’s different from goal setting. Set your intentions for the day. If you are going to go to the gym, set your intention to give 100% focus even if you’re only in there for 10 – 15 minutes. Set your intention to make that 15 the best you’ve ever done.

The other thing they don’t do….they are easily distracted with instant gratification. Now I don’t want to label anyone here but this is becoming more prominent in millennials because that is the life they have been used to. They are used to having mobile phones, cell phones in America where I am at the moment and it doesn’t just make a phone call anymore. Guilty of having that on the desk, the light lighting up and they are looking at it or the buzz or an email bling coming through. We are very easily distracted with instant gratification which puts us off our focus.

Also the 95%ers don’t work at mastering their craft. So they don’t really think about how can I become that 1 or 10% better, what do I need to work on here. They don’t even look at the successful calls for example, because success leaves clues. So they wait until their manager pulls calls that they are not doing well with and review them. But they don’t actually think about mastering their craft if they are in sales but if you were a professional sportsman you would. You would be looking at how you can get better each day, is it the diet, is it the training, is it the weight training, is it the cardio. So you have to look at mastering your craft and the 95%ers don’t really do that.

They need their weekend to come because they hate work. I’ve heard that a lot of the time, some people can’t wait for the weekend and hate a Monday. Not a good way to live if that’s the moment you’re in. They like to complain and moan about others and we are all guilty of it. There is nobody here that can say they haven’t moaned and complained but they seem to do it a lot more, sometimes they’re not even aware of the amount that they do.

They have a negative mindset to start with. A lot of them don’t work on positive mantras, work on their mindset, what they feed it so they have a negative mindset in general. They don’t set goals or even if they have written them down, they don’t follow through on them. We’ve been told to write our goals down but many people write them down and then don’t revisit them. They find them months later and go “oh yeah I wrote that goal down, I forgot about that”. They don’t set their goals and they don’t follow through on them. I’m going to give you a tip for that, maybe in the next slide.

Life happens to them, they don’t make life happen. So this is a belief that 95%ers have and maybe they are not even aware of it. They think life happens to them, they don’t make life happen. The 5%ers make things happen. They make their choices through feelings and emotions, we have just spoken about that…..and not through their standards and goals. They lack real effort and I mean effort. Think about what you’re putting in. It’s not just turning up for the job, it’s really putting in that effort. Do you have salespeople who wait to put in effort when they are told by their managers? Well if you are listening to this, you should be taking full charge of that and breaking out of this 95% and getting into the elite.

So all of this equals average salespeople and you can find them everywhere. I’ve run a few businesses myself and had to do some recruitment and average salespeople are everywhere, they grow on trees. You can just pluck them. What you really want to do is tap into the 5%ers.

So let’s have a look at what the 5%ers do. They usually are crystal clear on what they want. They have a goal, they have a clear vision and they know they are going directly for that. They set their intentions for the day. We were talking about that early so you really just want to do that. That gets you into the right mood, that’s the thing that sets the mood for you. Set your intention for the day. They focus on their goals and review them constantly and consistently. The thing is about goal setting…… I’ve done a lot of goal setting courses and written down how to set goals. I’ve done it myself, I’ve not revisited them and I’ve forgotten about them. Now what works for me on goals is scheduling them. It’s actually putting them in an Outlook calendar and putting them in as something that needs to be scheduled. When you schedule your goal, for me anyway, it gets done. I remember a chap called Bob Proctor saying something one time that really hit home for me. He said do not ask if you are worthy of the goal, ask if the goal is worthy of you because you are trading your life for it. So don’t ask if you are worthy of the goal, ask if the goal is worthy of you because you are trading your life for it.

5%ers also realise they create their life. You’re in full control of creating your life and they realise that. Life is not something that happens to them, they create it. The other thing is that they work at mastering their craft. There is a saying: winners focus on winning, losers focus on the winner. Just turning back on that one, work at mastering your craft. Don’t worry about the opposition, don’t worry about the competition, work at your game.

The 5%ers also embrace and enjoy the journey. They have that focus and are crystal clear on what they want. But a lot of the milestones are about enjoying and embracing the journey towards it and not so much always focused on the end goal.

They don’t complain, so you’ve got that winning or learning mentality. I think when you have that mentality, especially in sales it really changes the way that you think. You’re either winning or you’re learning. So if you don’t close something or something doesn’t go the way you thought, you’re learning, you’ve got to learn from it.

They have a positive mindset and they manage distractions better than the 5%ers. So I’m just going to put it out there actually, so if you are a manager or you are in sales, put the phone away. Put it away for bouts of focused concentration. Switch it off for 45 minutes, the world is not going to end. If you can start to do little bouts of that with full focus and start managing your distractions. Technology is there to be a servant, it’s not there to be our master and sometimes it masters people more than serves them.

The 5%ers work on personal development, they will listen to programs, they will read books, they’ll watch videos. They work on their personal development and I see that time and time again. They have the Be Do Have mentality. What do I mean by that? The 95%ers have a Have Be Do mentality, they have to have these things so they can become that person they want to be so they can do the things that person does. When you have the Be Have Do mentality that’s when you decide to become the person, so you walk, talk and act like that top salesperson. You become them, you do the things and actions that that top salesperson would do and evidently it happens to you and you have the things that that person has. The Be Do Have mentality.

They make their choices through standards and goals more often than emotions and feelings and they put in REAL EFFORT. They put in that effort because they are working at mastering their craft and this all equals success.

A gentleman once said to me, “Stephen, I want you to remember this. You are the only problem you will ever have.” I thought right, okay. He said “now here’s the good news, you are the solution”. So you’re the only problem you’ll ever have but the good news is you are the solution. Success is something that you attract, not something you pursue. Success is looking for a good place to (inaudible) so work on yourself and attract it towards you.

The thing that you have total control over is your thoughts and your actions. So just remember that, you are the solution. Don’t look at other people, don’t look at things that you are not in control of. You are the solution to your problems.

So let’s have a look at handling pressure. I know a lot of people in sales have a lot of pressure weeks and it comes to the end of the month and the pressure’s on.

I always say to people and you will see that on the right hand side of the slide, pressure makes diamonds. If you can convince yourself and you know and work at handling pressure, you begin to thrive on it.

There’s a four step process I used to do for handling pressure and I will give you some examples as well that will help you in sales. But let’s first take a look at this four step process.

What is the worst case scenario that can happen?

People get a lot of pressure when, in fact, Steph and I were just talking about people who get really and feel the pressure when they are doing their first webinar and they start sweating and panicking, is that right Steph?

Steph: Yeah, yep, they do some of them.

Stephen: It’s about handling the pressure, so what is the worst case scenario that can happen? You freeze, you slip up on a word or two, the screen freezes or the technology goes wrong. It doesn’t matter, it’s not a life threatening situation, nobody’s going to die. So you have to look at the worst case scenario .

You have to look at what’s within your control and what’s outside your control.

So what’s within your control and what’s out of your control and if something is out of your control then we have to drop it. We cannot worry about that, all we have to do is focus on what’s within our control and take control of that. We need to drop the things that are out of our control.

Prioritise the cause.

So if you have reviewed this with what’s the worst case scenario and what’s within your control, and you are thinking these three things could go wrong. You need to prioritise what you think is the main thing that’s causing this pressure for you. So prioritise the cause and then when you’ve got that I want you to look at the deepest why?

The deepest why?

What do I mean by that? You need to review why you are feeling this way and you’ll give yourself some answer to it and then you’ve got to dig deeper. Why is that? Keep digging deeper because you’ll probably find after 3 or 4 times it will give you the truth.

So what’s the worst case scenario, what’s within your control and out of your control (focus what’s within), then prioritise the causes that are causing this and let’s have a look at what’s your top ranked one, then dig into the deepest why in that. Once you do all of this process you start to feel the pressure go off you a bit.

The other thing I say to salespeople is I want you to have the mindset of a doctor. What do I mean by that? Well, I see a lot of people especially coming to the end of the month with targets to be hit where the focus is on getting the deal done, closing a deal, closing a sale, I need to close a deal, I need to close a sale. It becomes this mantra that builds pressure. Whereas if you actually change what you are thinking it’s not what can I close today but who can I help today. When you just start changing your thoughts on that, “I’m going to go on the phone and I’m going to see who I can really help today and if there is an opportunity to help someone there, then I’m going to give it all I’ve got”.

Going back to the mindset of a doctor, you don’t go to the doctors when you are ill and sit down and then they just prescribe you something and say “here you go take one of them and you’ll be fine”. That would be malpractice, you have to sit down there and they have to question you, they have to go through a discovery of what’s wrong with you and what you’ve done and what you’re on. It’s like that in sales. Sales is all about asking the right questions, having that right discovery with them and having the mindset to see if we can help them and if we can, the sale should be easy.

Pressure is created in our minds, we are in full control of that so I hope that helps in the handling of pressure. Another thing about handling pressure is, you may have seen this acronym before, F.E.A.R

A lot of people say that it stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. You may have heard of that before, False Evidence Appearing Real. That is a great acronym to use. What I like to use though is, Face Everything And Rise. Face Everything And Rise, for me that gets me pumped up, it’s more motivational and it just gives you the right psychology to go for it. Face Everything And Rise is how I like to use the acronym F.E.A.R.

We are all going to make mistakes, we are all going to fail but most people don’t go for hopes and dreams because they fear failure or they have a case of perfectionitis. I know that I certainly suffered from that years ago when putting things together. We have to get over that and you’ll find the most successful people actually just put that stuff out there, they don’t worry about having it done perfectly. So Face Everything And Rise, I want you to think about that.

What I’m going to share with you next is how to deal with negative states. I was driving one day to a job I was working in and I was complaining about the traffic I was sitting in and I was thinking about ”what are you doing with your life, why do I have to sit in all of this everyday?” I just realised as I was listening to this personal development program on the radio, it was a seminar and the chap says “there’s people travelled from all around the world today and I want everyone to give Cayleigh a round of applause. She’s travelled 8 hours and flew here today, so give Cayleigh a round of applause”. And he started clapping and I’m thinking “okay, what’s so great about that?” and just as I got the words out of my mouth, he said “Cayleigh doesn’t have any arms or any legs” and he invited her up on to the stage. Everyone started a standing ovation and applause and it got me thinking in the negative state that I’m in, what am I bothered about.

So the first step in getting rid of negative states is to congratulate yourself of being aware of the state you’re in. When I was driving the car I was aware I was in this state. Congratulate yourself that you’ve noticed you’re in this state, that’s step 1.

Step 2 is to actually replace it with positive things. So I was actually thinking what have I got to complain about? I’m complaining about sitting in some traffic when you’ve got people out there more motivational at that point, with no arms, no legs. It’s like that famous saying I felt sorry for the man with no shoes until I met the man with no feet. So I want you just to think about replacing it with positive things. In my car, I started thinking what have you got to complain about? You’ve got a beautiful home, you’re driving this nice car, I’ve got a beautiful family that loves me, I’ve got 3 healthy daughters and a beautiful wife. So you have to replace it with positive things that you’ve got in your life because we are usually a lot better off than we realise.

When you’ve done that the final stage is, where can I focus my attention right now? Right now in this moment, to fully immerse myself in something. Let’s take sales for example, if you are in a negative state in selling you can’t get up for it. I want you to congratulate yourself that you’ve realised you’re in a negative state. So the first thing is well done, I ‘ve noticed I’m in a negative state. What am I going to do now? I’m going to replace it with positive things, what’s great in my life? Give gratitude, I’ve got this, I’ve got that and then where can you put your attention right in that moment just to fully immerse yourself. That would be a case of fully focusing on the task in hand, so if it’s making 50 calls jump right on that phone, make those 50 calls and get fully focused and immersed in it.

People who do adrenaline things for example, things like jumping out of a plane, base jumping, all that kind of stuff. They’ve got to be in the moment or they are going to die! So it’s the exact same, when you fully immerse yourself in the moment you don’t think about anything else. You don’t think about all the stuff that’s going on in our life and things like that.

That’s the 3 step process, so congratulate yourself that you are aware of it, replace it with some positive thoughts and then where can I focus my attention right now and get yourself immersed in the process.

So shall we recap on what we covered? That’s 45 minutes, we’ve been going.

Here are 7 key tips for your performance.

Be aware of what you’re feeding your mind.

Start feeding it with positivity and this will have to be conscious competence at the start, you will have to consciously do this before it becomes unconscious competence and you don’t have to think about it. So be aware of what you are feeding your mind, start feeding it positive thoughts.

Be a professional. Master your craft.

Start putting in the work like a professional athlete, work at your game. There is a saying I always say to people in training…..if you are going to be in the room, be in the room.

Become more focused and less immediate gratification.

Put the phones away, get some into some bouts of focused selling. Maybe if you are a leader, play a rule, even if it’s the first hour of the day. I know that removing the phones from some younger generations is like removing an arm.

Make choices through your standards and goals, not emotions and feelings.

Take extreme ownership.

Take full accountability of your results. Take accountability on what you are giving out on that day, what are your intentions. Are you giving out positivity?

F.E.A.R. – Face Everything And Rise

I want you to think of fear now as Face Everything And Rise. Just do it, if you are not feeling up to it just face it and rise to the occasion.

Congratulate – positive things – attention right now.
To get rid of negative thoughts, use the 3 step process. Congratulate yourself of your awareness, replace it with positive things and fully immerse yourself in a task at hand there and then.

So I hope that helps. Over to you Steph.

Steph: Great, thank you so much Stephen. Absolutely amazing session. We’ve had some questions so we are going to pop over to Live Q&A now. If you have got questions for Stephen please send them through and I will do my best to get them over to him.

Okay so what have we got here? Someone said Yum about the sausages, great!

Will I be able to get a recording? Yes, I will send it out tomorrow.

If you wanted to help someone transition from the 95% to the 5%, where and how would you start? Great question, that’s from

Stephen: Great question and all the answers are there. The slides go in that order, so you’ve got your 5% and then the next slide you’ve got your 95%. It’s starting to review those slides and start slowly but surely doing things. The things that you can start doing immediately is goal setting, setting intentions for the day so you can kick off with that for starters. There are quick fixes that you can do but here’s the thing, it has to be done on a daily basis. It’s about sustained effort. If any of the listeners have seen any of my videos on Linkedin, there’s one about sustained effort. That’s what it’s about, it’s not about doing this one day and making your life change. It’s a bit like going to the gym, if you want to build muscle you need to go there on a consistent basis. It’s not about you going and putting in all the effort one day and maybe outdone someone but someone who’s doing that on a consistent basis. I would just look at the two slides on what we’ve just covered and take little things from them that you can start with and just start there.

Steph: Great, thanks Stephen. I know time is up in just about a minute but I’m just going to keep going with the Q&A even though we are over, just bear with us. If you need to pop off that’s fine the Q&A will be in the recording.

I’m going to ask you the next question from Byron and he is asking as team leaders how can we encourage others to adopt these ideas, ie. How can we put them into a company ethos? Thanks Byron.

Stephen: Good question Byron. Leaders shouldn’t ask their team to do anything they wouldn’t do themselves. The best way I’ve found to actually get the team to do these things is to lead by example. When I ran sales teams I would lead by example. They knew I was into my self development, I would share things like this, I would do buzz sessions on it. Really for me that’s the start point, to lead by example and that creates your ethos.

If you’re the team, you set the team rules. If you look at these crack teams of the SAS or the Navy Seals, they are one team, they are one unit. Let’s say they’ve been training all day and they get the call up to storm a building, you’re not going to see some of them going “I can’t be bothered today, can you cover for me?” They don’t have that mentality. Obviously, it’s because it’s a life or death situation but for me that tells me it’s a decision, it’s a decision. If you want to have that ethos and you want people to start transitioning over to it ….it’s like Ghandi said it’s ”become the change you want to see”. I hope that helps, I hope that’s a starting point for you.

Steph: I’ve got a couple of questions here that tie in together so Sarah has asked if you have any tips for anxiety and Christian has asked if you have any advice for dealing with rejections. We’ve got another about any tips for calming nerves on the phone, so they all kind of fit together, can you…..

Stephen: There are two things. First of all they say that confidence, there’s two types of confidence. There’s self confidence and there’s confidence. The difference is that self confidence comes from within, confidence is an outer thing. A lot of people don’t realise that.

For me, overcoming nerves and anxiety and fears and things like that, it all boils down usually to two things. First thing is you can overcome that by experience. So when you’ve done something, let’s say you were nervous about doing a webinar. When you’ve done 50, 500 webinars you are no longer nervous. When you are nervous about going on the phone to sell, you are nervous at the start but when you’ve done it for a long time you are no longer nervous. So it comes from experience.

But what do you do when you don’t have the experience? Well, confidence and getting rid of fear and anxieties comes from preparation. As long as you know that you have prepared the best that you can, that should take care of it. Another thing is you are going to get nervous, you are going to have fears, everybody does. I remember watching a documentary on Adele, the singer and she said that she gets so nervous before a concert that sometimes she will throw up. She said when she throws up she knows that’s going to be the best concert she’ll ever deliver. She’s actually reframed the situation that when she does throw up, it’s going to be the best concert she’ll ever deliver.

There’s a couple of things there, it’s about being well prepared and also reframing the situation. So if you haven’t got the experience, it’s preparation and then reframing it. You are going to get nerves, you’re going to get nervous in everything that you do. I wouldn’t worry about it, it’s just reframing it and using that. You need nerves, especially in sports for example. Sports players need that edge, they need those nerves, it’s how you use it.

I remember years ago an old boxing coach customer, Cus D’Amato, who was coaching Mike Tyson at the time, who was the most feared man in the world. He was having self doubts when he was about 17/18. Everybody was terrified of him, he was this beast of a boxer. They didn’t know he was having self doubts, he didn’t think he could win this, he didn’t think he could do it. Cus D’Amato put an arm around him and said “Look, Mike I’m going to tell you the story about the coward and the hero. Both of them going into this ring feel the same way. They both feel nervous, they both have butterflies, they both feel sick, it’s just what the hero does that makes him the hero and it’s what the coward doesn’t do that makes him the coward. They both feel the same way”.

I hope that helps. Was there another part to that Steph?

Steph: No, no. I’ve got to ask you maybe one or two more questions, just to squeeze them in if that’s okay. Sue, she said where can we find more material from Stephen?

Stephen: Oh, I don’t know if I am allowed to say that? I have got some stuff coming out in the future so just watch this space. Right now, I really enjoy working as the Global Training Director for Lead Forensics, so I am really all in on that at the moment but I’ve done a webinar for you guys before and maybe we can do some more now that we’ve got a lot more trainers here supporting me and helping me with Lead Forensics, maybe we can get some more done.

Steph: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, one last question then. Mark has asked you if you are dragged down by someone close to you, how do you manage that?

Stephen: That’s a great question. Now here’s something that may cause some controversy….cut them out of your life. A lot of people would say to me “oh but it’s my wife” or it’s this or that. Okay so it becomes more serious at that point in time. If you’ve got someone close to you that drags you down all of the time, if you cannot cut them out of your life and this goes for anybody…family, best friends. You have to bring it up, you have to discuss it and you have to tell them. “I want to be this type of person and this brings me down and we can’t have it, so let’s work together on that”. If you have a choice, I would cut them out of your life. There’s a famous story of Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of his rules was he would cut negative people out of his life. He never had any negativity around him and if somebody was negative they would get one chance and they would be completely cut out of his life. It can be quite brutal but that’s the truth of the matter because when they do that they are putting you in a negative vibration and it’s not good to be in a negative vibration. That’s what I would say: cut them out or discuss it, I don’t want anyone losing their marriage over this.

Steph: Excellent, thank you Stephen. I’m afraid we have come to the end of our time today, please don’t worry if we haven’t got through to your question we will be answering people on an individual basis.

Stephen: Just one thing, I know that someone asked about where they can get more stuff. If you connect with me on Linkedin, I do put some videos out there from time to time and if you’ve not seen any, get on there and have a look at them.

Steph: Okay, excellent, thanks Stephen. A quick reminder for the survey at the end, please let us know your thoughts. Thank you so much Stephen for presenting today and answering those questions.

Stephen: That’s okay, I enjoyed it.

Steph: thank you everybody for attending today, from all of us here at Lead Forensics. I hope you enjoyed this session and you found some value in it and we hope to have you at another webinar soon.