The Three-Letter Thing That’s Standing in the Way of your Sales Success
Ego.
In sales, ego is your enemy. The way to combat it is not by backing down, but rather by stepping up.
I’m a big proponent of executing the basics first, and then getting cute with fancy tools and sales tech stacks later. If you can’t articulate your value to a person standing right in front of you, then how can you reasonably expect to sell to a thousand people at a time?
That message was reinforced at Outbound 2019 when I heard the best sales speaker lineup I’ve ever seen remind a thousand people that they already knew what they needed to do to get better results.
You can drive more conversations and get in front of more people. How? Not by frantically increasing your activity metrics, but by understanding your value, blocking time to do important work, and then actually doing it. Phone calls, cold emails, knocking on doors, in-person networking, online networking… The how doesn’t matter nearly as much as the why and the what.
I have been thinking about why more salespeople don’t do this. I flashed back to a conversation I had with Dan Waldschmidt, and it hit me during a podcast Christie and I recorded with Larry and Darrell on the Selling From The Heart Podcast…
Ego is getting in the way of your results.
You believe that you have to do things a certain way. Either that’s what you’ve been told, or it’s what you feel like you’re seeing all around you. Using a complicated set of programs and apps that you don’t understand, or putting an impersonal script ahead of simply treating your prospects like human beings.
You can’t stand the idea of not appearing busy. So you’d better be checking your phone constantly, tweeting something, getting caught up in pointless arguments on LinkedIn, and otherwise just spinning yourself around in a circle. You forget that you’re not getting much actual work done. Busyness rarely translates directly to business, but hey, you’ve got to hustle, right?
If you happen to make your number for the month, or get just close enough to stay off your manager’s radar, then you relax. It’s not that you couldn’t be better, or that you’re all that interested in championing mediocrity, but the weight of these collective expectations is more than you ever bargained for. Once you get it off your shoulders, you’re not interested in going any further. Never mind that the flywheel works for you, and every successive step actually makes the journey much easier. If Joe Six Pack is working for the weekend, then Average Joe Sales Guy is working for the first of the month.
Your manager can’t actually mentor you on that, because she’s got a number to hit, and doesn’t trust her team to deliver the number on their own. She feels she has to step in and be the hero herself. This cycle repeats itself all the way up to the CEO, making it a terribly difficult cycle to break- unless someone is brave enough to risk a short term deficit for long term success.
I think some of you still reading this are wondering about the "egos" of the top performers. The suits, the cars, the trips… I don’t think that’s ego. I think that’s arrogance. In large doses, arrogance allows you to overpower your ego. I don’t think arrogance is bad unless it gets out of hand and you start blatantly offending people. When balanced properly, I like to call it swagger.
While arrogance is confidence at scale, confidence is also the key to humility, which is necessary for you to set your ego aside. Regardless of the direction you take, the key to overcoming ego is not by stepping down, it’s by confidently stepping up.
For the better part of the first year of my sales career, I thought I was getting it all wrong. I almost gave it up. Then I found some resources that gave me the confidence to do it my way, which turned out to be the right way all along, and my career took off.
At every stage in my career, there has been someone or something that gave me the nudge to forge ahead, reminding me that my instincts were good, and that people, my prospects and customers, needed what I brought to the table.
My lack of confidence in those moments was amplified by my ego. I needed to be brave enough to contend with it in order to succeed, but every time I was able to push through, my world changed for the better. This week provided so many more nudges, and I’m ready to move again. I’m hoping you’ll come along with me.
This is my challenge to you. Take 15 minutes today. Sit down in a quiet place and leave your phone in another room. No distractions, no managers, no outside noise. All you need is a pen, a pad of paper, and your brain.
Take the biggest deal you’re working on. Write down the value you can provide them, the next steps, a timeline, and what you’ll need to do in order to accomplish them. This quick exercise will provide you with a roadmap that will bring you the clarity you’re looking for, and you’ll actually be able to execute it. Make sure they’re your first call tomorrow morning, get your process started, deploy tools and resources as necessary, then repeat.
You know what you need to do. Trust that. Move forward. Keep going.
Jeff Bajorek
Real. Authentic. Experience.
There’s a big difference between knowing how to sell and being able to. Jeff Bajorek spent over a decade in the field as a top performer. He’s been in your shoes. He knows what it will take. He can help you succeed.
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