How to Overcome the Fear of Selling

Scared of selling? Feel like you’re terrible at it? Then you’re not special. Seriously. Everybody thinks that they’re not good at sales, but you’re not as bad as you think. In this article, we’re going to go over seven tips to overcoming your fear of selling.

Tip #1: Ask yourself where your impressions of sales comes from.

We often associate used car salesman or door-to-door salesman from years ago, but the reality is that sales has changed a lot from those days. If we aren’t aware of this, we can’t actually begin to understand where our impressions come from. And as a result, we can’t get woke about how we view sales.

Tip #2: Reframe sales more as problem-solving.

If you think about sales, simply as trying to understand more about the person you’re trying to sell and what their motivations are, as well as what their needs are, you’ll realize that it’s more like a puzzle than it is necessarily climbing a mountain. The simple question that you’re trying to answer is whether or not you’re going to be able to provide a product or service that meets their need.

Whenever I’ve trained and mentored sales reps in the past, we’ve first had to identify where our impressions of sales came from. And then we transitioned to talking about specifically how to provide value for our prospects. It’s all about providing value to your prospects. It’s all has been helping these sales reps understand that sales is not so much about selling something onto somebody so much as giving them value that they didn’t have before, which leads me to my third tip.

Tip #3: Forget your sales pitch.

I know that you spent a ton of time memorizing the features and benefits of your product or service, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. Instead of getting all hyped and nervous about your sales pitch, just focus on listening to your prospect. What are they telling you their needs are? What are they telling you their timeline is? And then go from there.

Focus more on simply filling the gaps in your customer’s education about your space, your product, or your service. Customers these days naturally are going to come to you with questions because we’re in the time of an educated consumer in which we, as buyers like to show up to a company’s doorstep when we have done some preliminary research ourselves.

One of the reasons why sales reps get so fearful of selling is because they’ve been rejected so many times when they’re giving their pitch. So, instead don’t focus on giving your pitch in the most traditional way. Instead, just sit back, listen to what your prospect has to say and answer the question as to whether or not you can meet their needs.

Tip #5: Keep a log of your wins and losses.

My fifth tip is to make sure that you’re keeping a log of your wins and your losses. Ultimately, you’re going to have a lot of both. So it’s really important that you’re taking each one and stride in terms of what you learned from each experience.

Get a notebook or create a spreadsheet that essentially answers these core questions. What went well on this call? What didn’t go wel? And what would you have changed if you were to do that same call again? If you had a fear of selling that call, why do you think you had that fear? And how would you overcome that fear if you were to replay that conversation again?

This act of active reflection will help you overcome your fear of closing and start closing even more deals.

Tip #6: Start and end with a value.

If you’re taking all of my prior tips to heart, then you know how important this is at this point. Pretty much what you want to think about is how in every conversation you can teach something new to your prospect or help them out in some sort of way. This could be something as simple as sharing a marketing asset, a sales asset, an educational resource, or even some case studies of some past successes your clients have had.

What I’d like to do in the past is I like to record a personalized one minute video, just checking in with these prospects and catching up on something that we talked about in our prior conversation. If you spend less time thinking about your prospects, like numbers, that help you reach your quota and more time of thinking of them as humans that are simply trying to solve problems, you will notice a big shift in terms of how you treat your prospects and how your prospects treat you.

The reason why is because you’re going to become more and more outcome independent as to whether or not they use your product and service. And as a result, you’re going to be more focused and rooted in giving them an awesome sales experience.

Tip #7: Treat your prospects like good friends.

My seventh and favorite tip, when it comes to overcoming your fear of selling is to simply treat your prospects more like they’re really good friends. You wouldn’t treat your really good friend poorly. And so don’t treat your prospect poorly. Instead, have fun with them and think about ways to make your conversations much lower stakes than a typical sales conversation.

By doing so you’re going to be able to build rapport more quickly with your prospects. And as a result, they’re going to trust you more when it comes time to make a decision about your product or service. By making your prospects feel like a million bucks, they’re going to help you make a million bucks, but first you have to treat them like a really good friend.

Big takeaways

There are two things I want you to remember from this article:

  1. The first one is that overcoming your fear of sales starts with addressing your stereotypes around sales. You can’t start to get better at closing and overcoming your fear of closing until you address why you don’t like closing or the concept of sales in the first place. If you want a book recommendation, check out To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink. It will be a great way for you to bust the myths that you might have about sales.
  2. The second big takeaway is to remember, to be value-driven as opposed to numbers-driven. When you put the needs of your prospects ahead of your own, you will quickly realize that it’s much easier for you to build rapport and also have those closing sales conversations.

If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning these seven best tips when it comes to overcoming your fear of sales.