slump [sluhmp] -noun 1. a period of decline or deterioration; 2. a period in which a person performs slowly, inefficiently, or ineffectively.

A couple weeks ago we looked at your Confidence Journey from building a foundation, becoming passionate and creative and finally entering an altruistic state of confidence. As a result of much positive feedback and a few reader questions, this week we will look at how to handle one of the biggest challenges you’ll face throughout your Confidence Journey - a slump.

The following is one letter in particular that pretty much summarized and echoed the questions from the others.

Hey Scott,

I’m very confident and comfortable in the product I sell because I know it works and I know we’ve got a quality team. My question is this - do you have any tips for keeping that confidence UP in a slower market? I went through a really slow month (May) and it got me in the dumps and made me begin to question my abilities, but now all of a sudden, I’m on fire again! All through May I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out what I needed to tweak, what I was missing, what I needed to do better to get my numbers up and I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong, so then the self doubts and the questions started. But now the confidence is way back up. So at any rate, any tips for keeping confidence high through the lows?

Thanks,

Angela

This question and the others are excellent, excellent questions. However, let’s focus on Angela’s as the basis for how to keep your confidence while working through a slump. Starting out, she appears to be on the right track with reviewing the things she was doing in order to get better and break through her slump. This can be an effective course of action when dealing with many situations as it can help you identify where you may be slipping and get you back on track.

However, this can also have you spinning your wheels wondering what is going wrong. The downfall here is when you are looking for what is going wrong with what you are doing, it starts chipping away at your confidence. And when you don’t find anything to tweak or change, your confidence really starts taking a hit! My good friend Lisa would refer to this as looking at your situation from a “deficit” perspective.

Conversely, a shift in perspective may help not only break through a slump, but keep and strengthen your confidence along the way. This paradigm shift moves away from a deficit perspective to focus positively on your situation from an “asset” perspective.

(Keep in mind for the purpose of this article, we are focusing purely on “how” you can keep and build your confidence during a slump. The “what’s” that you can do is for a different article.)

Digging a little deeper into the asset perspective as it relates to making your “tweaks,” rather than look at what you may have been doing wrong or what you were missing (mentally processed as a weaknesses), look at what you have done or are doing great that led to your successes (mentally processed as strengths) and make your tweaks and reinforcements off of them. This will strengthen and build your actions and activities to push through a slump. This will also keep you focused on positive actions and feed your confidence.

One last thing on confidence… Remember that confidence and attitude is a state of mind. It is something that we can consciously control despite what we are going through. It may be tougher at times, but we can choose to persevere and take actions that build our confidence. With time, effort and attention, sustained confidence and positive attitude will eventually become second nature. If you have not yet seen the movie “Pursuit of Happyness,” it is an excellent example of pushing through your slump and maintaining your focus that in turn keeps and builds your confidence - even among the bleakest of times.

Wrapping up, your circumstances may make it more challenging sometimes, but remembering to look at those circumstances from an asset perspective keeps you focused, energized and confident. It is then - with focus and confidence - that you will be able to see the opportunities and the doors that are opening up to you, rather than the road blocks that are being thrown at you.

confidence [kon-fi-duhns] -noun 1. belief in oneself and one’s powers or abilities. 2. The state of mind characterized by one’s reliance on himself, or his circumstances; a feeling of self-sufficiency; such assurance as leads to a feeling of security; self-reliance

Successful sales people share many of the various sales traits; however there is one that you will find in every successful sales person - Confidence. This week we will look at this key characteristic in its various forms and stages and how confidence, if developed effectively, will help you to continually grow and become more and more successful. This article may be more applicable for someone getting started, but may also have an A-ha or two for anyone.

Confidence comes in many forms; confidence in product, confidence in service, confidence in delivery, confidence in performance, confidence in warranty. But the confidence that propels someone from just being in sales to succeeding in sales is confidence in self.

It’s been my experience that the confidence cycle grows through four stages: foundational, passionate, creative and altruistic. Let’s take a closer look at each of these stages.

Whether you just got started as a commissioned sales rep, are a small business owner that also wears a sales hat, or an entrepreneur that is an expert in your field, no one gets paid until a sale is made. Getting started requires a lot of time studying your product, your service, your market and several other items that will build the confidence foundation you will need for your ability to make a sale.

While you are building your confidence foundation, you will encounter some challenges and road blocks that will try to crush your confidence. The biggest is rejection. Realize that as you are growing in your confidence, you will be rejected. However, that rejection is vital in building a strong, solid confidence. Going through the rejection gives you a basis to look back on and see that in spite of it, you were able to grow. Don’t welcome rejection, but embrace it as something that is typical at this stage and is helping you get to the next level.

This foundational type of confidence is needed to talk intelligently about your product or service. Without it, your prospects will not develop confidence in you, let alone your product or service. Once you have this foundational confidence, you begin landing a few sales here and there. As a result, you build momentum, your confidence grows and you land more and more sales.

Now that the foundation of your confidence is built and is strong, you no longer speak intelligently about your product or service. Instead, you begin to speak passionately about your product or service.

Your prospect senses your passion and the manner in which you speak about your product or service and the absolute belief that what you have is the best solution available. Your passion is transferred to your prospect and his desire to work with you and buy your product is significantly increased. As a result, you now begin to close more sales more frequently.

Now comes the fun part. Wait a minute! You’re making sales hand over fist and that isn’t the fun part!? Nope. Now you’re brimming with confidence and ready to go to the next level. This is where your creativity kicks in. Not creative? Baloney! You know your product or service inside and out, you’ve spent the last several months or years building and strengthening not only your confidence but the relationships you’ve made along the way, and you’ve worked through countless scenarios that have built the experience capital that you can draw upon.

With your creative confidence in place, you now begin creating more sales rather than making new sales. Your experiences and relationships present opportunities that you were never aware of before. You use those experiences and relationships to manufacture creative ways and opportunities to sell more and more.

The final stage of your sales confidence is altruistic, where your concern is no longer how or when you will make your next sale, but whom and how many people you can truly help by providing the best product or service. The rush you get is no longer from blowing away your monthly sales goal by the end of the second week. In this stage, the rush you get is from knowing your customer is truly better off because of what you provided.

In this final confidence stage, you also not only look for opportunities to provide to your customers, but also look for opportunities to help others in your field. The experiences and opportunities you’ve had over the years is something that you look to share with others that are growing through their own confidence cycle. The joy you get here is in seeing others coming up behind you grow, succeed and eventually join you in your confidence.

Here is the exciting part - the confidence journey is there for anyone willing to take that first step. It’s not as easy as just taking a first step, you need to commit to the journey and work your tail off along the way. But the end is definitely worth the means. The journey does not discriminate and there is plenty of room for as many people that want to go. So what do you say? Want to take a trip with me? If so, shoot me an e-mail and let me know - the more the merrier!

This week I am excited to write about one of my favorite topics - Attitude! Not just attitude, but positive, nothing’s-gonna-stop-me attitude. The type of attitude that does not settle to just see the glass half full. Rather, it is the type of attitude that sees the half-full glass as an opportunity to fill it up! It is an attitude that blasts past “can-do” to “WILL-do.” In short, it’s what happens when attitude meets commitment.

Before going on, I must warn you, I am very passionate about attitude and may come across a little over-the-top. But I do so to emphasize the importance and power of your attitude. I have not mastered it by any means, but I work towards it every day. These are the thoughts and mantras that drive me to sharpen my attitude. I have way more thoughts, opinions and philosophies on attitude to fit in one newsletter, so this will just be the scratch on the attitude surface. So consider this the Cliff Notes on Attitude according to Scott. Buckle up, here we go!

The foundation of the will-do attitude is to live your life on purpose. The will-do attitude wakes up in the morning and is proactive throughout the day, not reactive. The will-do attitude is a mental edge that is ready to handle any circumstance. The will-do attitude anticipates change and is on point to not just deal with change, but embrace it for the opportunities it brings!

I heard a clip from the movie Star Wars over the weekend. In it, the little green Jedi Master named Yoda says “Do, or do not. There is no try!”

Wow! Right there in eight words is the epitome of attitude and commitment coming together. It forces you to make a choice. You are either going to do something or you are not going to do something. There is no alternative. You have a goal and you go get it. You don’t get deterred by obstacles, walls or road blocks. You persevere through them, using or finding the resources needed to obtain your goal.

Trying is a black hole that lives somewhere in between “do” and “do not” that sucks the life out of the will-do attitude. Converse to the will-do attitude, the “try” attitude is effort without commitment. Trying is sticking your toe in the water to see if it’s comfortable. Trying gives up when things get tough. Trying makes accomplishment a possibility rather than a certainty.

Another great example of the will-do attitude appeared in something a friend of mine and I were talking about last week. A group of us are working on a very large community project and with only a couple weeks to go, everything is coming together great! We stopped for two seconds to reflect on where we started and the class event that is upon us and commented on how huge this event will be! It was then that I said that with most things we all do, it usually takes just as much effort to go small as it does to go big, so why not go big!?

For this week, I am going to wrap up with my favorite quote on Attitude by Charles Swindoll. The actual quote is much longer than this, but paraphrased it is “The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.”

So there you have it. What choice are you going to make today. Are you going to do? Or are you going to do not? (I really hope you do!)

One of the greatest hockey players of all time is “the Great One” Wayne Gretsky. He was once asked how he got to be such a great player and he replied, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck in going to be.”

That really hit home for me, and probably would for many people. It can be very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind of what has to be done now - today - to keep the cash register ringing, that we lose a little focus on ringing the register tomorrow! But is focusing on doing what we need to do today, playing where the puck is, keeping us from being great tomorrow? Hmmmm…

One that can be done with a “right now” mentality is to get out your planner and schedule “tomorrow time” knowing that it is critical to do something right now that will add some cha-ching later. It doesn’t have to be a large amount of time, maybe 15-30 minutes to just focus on the future. Schedule it on a regular basis - at least once a week to get started and more often as you get into the swing of it. Set aside time somewhere without distractions and commit to it as if you were in a meeting or with a client.

When you schedule the time, there are two ways you can invest it. You can have some “hard time” and “soft time” and both are essential to your future focus.

The first is “hard time” - and no, it isn’t a prison sentence. Instead, this is where you will spend time doing something that will directly put something into action that will either bring in new business or keep yourself in front of your existing customers as well as your prospects. There are several things you can do with this kind of time. Let’s take a look at a few:

1. Send out a hand-written note to ten customers that you haven’t heard from in a while - especially if your product or service isn’t one that is regularly used. It doesn’t have to contain sales speak, just something to let them know that you were thinking of them and hope that they and their business are doing well.

2. Pick up the phone and place a call to a couple of those customers instead.

3. Pick a customer or a prospect and take a few minutes to drum up a referral for them. Talk about doing something that keeps you in their mind! You’ll be surprised at how quick and eager they will be to return the favor.

4. Create a newsletter or some other piece of periodic correspondence that you can use that will provide value to them first - and provide value to them second! - and keep you in front of them third so you are the first, and maybe only person they call when they need your product or service.

5. Take a few minutes and surf on-line for a unique website or story that may pertain to a particular client or prospect and forward it to them with a personal note.

6. Get creative with it and have fun with it. When others see the effort today with some creativity and fun behind it, they will be more apt to ring the till tomorrow.

Now let’s take a look at the “soft time.” This is very powerful time spent and I cannot stress enough the importance of doing this. It is time that you will use to provide some focus and direction for the future. This will be time where you will dream. Not by the way of a nap, but through creating and re-creating a vision for your business/sales future. As you are painting this mental picture, keep a journal of your thoughts and ideas that you can develop and reference back to from week to week.

This will be different from setting goals and forecasting. This is more allowing yourself to dream a little and craft some mental inspiration for where you are heading. Dream wild. Dream fun. Dream successful. Dream big.

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting the dreams of your future need to fit a social definition of big in terms of growth or successful in terms of financial standing. Rather, dream big in terms of where you’d want to be if not getting there wasn’t an option. “Big” is going to be very different for every person. Likewise, successful is going to be very different for everyone as well. It’s your big and your successful - go dream it, go focus on it and go get it!!

In your game of life, be good and live great! Spend a little time in the future and you’ll be able to “play where the puck is going to be!”

Let’s get the white elephant out of the room right up front. Everything we see on the news, read in the papers and hear around the water cooler is how bad the economy is and how everyone is struggling through a recession.

However, that is just not true…at least not for everyone. For every story you hear about XYZ Company that is struggling or going out of business, I can tell you about ABC Inc. that is growing, expanding and prospering. Unfortunately, success stories just aren’t sexy. They don’t sell papers and they don’t boost ratings. But what they do is motivate and give hope to those of us that are choosing not to participate in the…a-hem…recession.

Here’s the twist: For many businesses, the economy isn’t necessarily “bad.” Rather, it’s “different!” Why? Because people and businesses are now doing business differently, and it didn’t just happen overnight. There have been several events over the past 8-10 years that have caused people to change their mindset when it comes to how they do business. The recent economy has just magnified and strengthened this mindset.

Businesses, big and small, are definitely keeping an eye on their bottom line. However, any amount of time keeping their eyes on the books is time they are taking their eyes off their customers which can be very costly. This is where we step in.

What can we do to position ourselves to prosper, and to help our customers prosper in this different economy? We can start by forgetting about what our customers can do for us, and concentrate on what we can do for our customers! They expect different things; they expect more, but not necessarily for less. They will still pay for a product or service that provides value, that improves efficiencies and that increases profits. They want more, so give them more. Give them VALUE! Give them something that someone else isn’t willing to give, that someone else is too lazy to give.

Our customers are no different than we are. If we receive value above and beyond that of any other product or service provider we buy from, we wouldn’t dream of shopping around. Likewise, our customers want to do business with us as long as we don’t give them a reason to leave, or allow someone else to give them a reason! Do not be “out-valued” by your competition. No one knows our customers better than we do - let them know that!

What about prospective customers? Well, they may require a little more work, but essentially they want the same things our existing customers want - value and a reason to do business with us.

So let’s take a look at a few general things we can do to provide value to our customers, solidify their trust and confidence in us and prosper in any economy.

1. Give, in all we do, without expectations - This is just a fundamental practice. Some call it karma, others the Law of Reciprocity. No matter what you call it, it works and it feels good doing it!

2. Provide indirect value - Our products/services have features that provide benefits. Those benefits provide value to our customers through the outcomes they realize or experience. Indirect value is anything else we provide to our customers in addition to our product or service. This could be as simple as delivering a quote rather than e-mailing it our putting a stamp on it.

3. Be a resource - Rather than just be a sales rep for your customer to call when they need to place an order, be proactive and continually look for ways that your product/service can help your customer improve efficiencies, reduce expenses/maintenance, increase profits, etc. Going a step further, who else do you know or what other product/service are you familiar with that could help your customer do the same.

4. Sell for your customer - By this I mean look for opportunities to refer business to your customers. This is the true essence of networking. If they know that you are looking out for them, it will go a long way towards keeping you on as their single-source provider.

5. Be WOW!! - Don’t be good, don’t be exceptional…be memorable and be WOW! Most of your competition is pretty good and many of them may be exceptional. We need to take exceptional to a new level, put on our creative caps and commit to doing things so over the top that our customers go out of their way to tell others about the experiences they have with us. Sometimes it doesn’t take a whole lot; you’d be surprised what little things may WOW your customers that no one else is willing to do. So what is your WOW going to be?

The specific things we do may be unique to the industries we are in, but these general guidelines will help us focus our efforts to sell our products and service differently just as our customers are doing business differently.

With everyone chiseling away at our spirit from all different angles, we have the opportunity to put on our “prosper armor” and choose to succeed. One of my favorite quotes (paraphrased) is that life is only 10% what happens to us and 90% how we respond. How will you respond to the “different economy?” Will your reactions keep you in the middle of the pack? Or will your proactions position you to prosper and succeed?