How to Get Over Being Nervous in Sales
Get over being nervous in sales if you want to approach each potential new customer with confidence and pitch as well as you can. Nerves can hold many salespeople back, and approaching a customer with anything other than complete confidence is likely to come out in your pitch. This can in turn lead to a worse reaction from the customer. Learning to get over your nerves is vital to ending this self-perpetuating loop of nervousness and failure. Do this by changing the way you think about sales and identifying the reason for your nerves.
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Instructions
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Write down the things about sales that make you nervous. Don’t hold back because you have to identify your specific fears to deal with them. Write down all the things that make you nervous, whether it’s calling a new customer, people being nasty to you or the possibility of failure. Looking at the things that make you nervous written in black and white can help you reevaluate them more easily.
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Change how you think about sales. Thinking about sales as being a profession where you bother other people is one reason people get nervous. Realize that you aren’t bothering people, you are helping them by speaking to them, whether it’s by offering a product or a service. Think about the ways in which your product or service could help most people. Whatever it is that they do for a profession that makes them busy, they are likely to be primarily interested in increasing revenue and decreasing expenses. Determine whether your product can do this if you're pitching to a business. Remember that you are doing a good thing by pitching to them.
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Read everything you can about your product. People are often afraid of being asked a question that they don’t know the answer to. Offset this by reading up about your products or services as much as possible. Learn everything you can, and then, in the unlikely event that someone asks you a question you don’t know the answer to, you can explain that you have read extensively around the subject, but you still aren’t positive of the answer to that specific question. Explain that you want to ensure you are absolutely correct and will get back to them when you have the answer.
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Watch a confident person selling to somebody. Notice how they aren’t stumbling over their words or displaying uneasy body language. Look at their success levels when compared to yours. Confidence is important to sales, and allaying your fears will often increase your sales and give you less to worry about. Realize that sales can be thought of as a simple numbers game. If you ask 10 people to buy your product, maybe one will be interested. If you ask a hundred, therefore, 10 will be interested. Rejections are part of the job, but it’s important to keep your confidence and positivity up, because each “no” is one step closer to a “yes.”
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Look at your list again and think about the reasons you don’t need to worry. Think of the other side of the argument, and consider the worst possible outcome of them. For example, you may be afraid of losing a big potential customer. If the person isn’t already a customer, then your company currently has no relationship with him. Even if you pitch terribly, the situation doesn’t change; the only possible change is that he agrees to purchase the product or service.
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References
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