Why We Sell Less—The Root of Confidence

	The hardest thing in business? Or life is the factor of confidence. Whether you're in online marketing, selling products or services, or run a physical store, the confidence goes up and down. And yet, confidence is what creates sales. Sales, after all, is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. So how can we create this enthusiasm without confidence? And where do we start looking?
Right click and ‘save as' to download

There are lots of things that I like doing: dancing, painting, cartooning, but one of the things I like the most is cooking.

Of course I invite people over to dinner. On this evening I'd invited one of my friends and I was making this very special dish. It's a multi-layered rice dish called a biryani. If you say the biryani to most people they get a little afraid because there's so much preparation involved, and you have to get so many things right.

Anyway, I got a few things wrong that day, but only I knew that I'd got those things wrong.

And yet when I went to serve the dish I mentioned that it was not up to standard. Now this friend of mine, he had never had a biryani before. He didn't know what a biryani was supposed to taste like, but what I said, it really affected him.

My lack of confidence spilled over and he didn't feel that the biryani was up to standard.

For ages after that, whenever we met he wanted all the other dishes except the biryani What did I do wrong? The answer doesn't lie in the recipe for the biryani or the way the biryani was made that evening. What it lies is in a factor of confidence.

Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another.

And that evening I wasn't transferring any enthusiasm, so I wasn't selling my dish. This is what we do a lot when we're at networking meetings, when we're at presentations, when we're selling a product or a product or a service to a client. We lack that enthusiasm. We don't appear confident, and then the client wants to think about it. They want to ask their mother, brother, sister about it before they decide.

Today we're going to talk about three aspects of confidence

We'll start out with the root of confidence. Where does the confidence come from? Is it inbuilt or do we have something that we have to learn?
The second is how to deal with this whole set of confidence issues when things don't seem to be going your way.
The third and most importantly, to realise how confidence is like a rechargeable battery, how you need to charge it up all the time.
To continue reading, download the transcript