You want selling to be fun! You’ve taken classes. You’ve read books. You know it can be fun. Lots of people say so!
You reach for the phone to make your next call and…the ghosts and goblins of negative mental chatter swoop up from the floorboards, out of the walls, through the ceiling. They say things like:
- Selling is sleazy; you have to manipulate people.
- I can’t take rejection.
- I shouldn’t have to do this. I was made for better things.
- People make me jump through hoops, and then they don’t buy.
- I just don’t have the hard core it takes to sell.
- I’m not that slick, and I don’t want to pressure people.
- I can sell for others, but not for myself.
- Selling is hard. I’m not good at it, and it isn’t fun.
- There’s a secret to selling that everybody knows except me.
- My mother would turn over in her grave if she knew I was doing this.
OH NO! NOW WHAT?
Surely you can’t reach out to people with all that going on! Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters of Selling! Blast those goblins with these 6 steps:
- Write down all the mental chatter. Put all those nasty thoughts outside yourself, on a list. If you can see them, you don’t have to be them.
- See them for what they are–negative thoughts, not reality. They’re just part of the endless stream of random musings that pass through our minds every day. We all have negative thoughts about all sorts of things. That doesn’t make them true.
- Take away their power. Negative thoughts don’t have to dictate your feelings or your actions. Just give them a friendly nod and direct your attention elsewhere, to something more positive.
- Call in the cavalry. Get support. Call a friend or colleague on your Ghostbusters Team and say, “The goblins have got me! Can I read you this ridiculous list?”
- Have a good laugh. When we write everybody’s negative mental chatter on a white board in workshops, there comes a point when somebody starts to snicker. Then more people begin to see the humor in the goblins, and sooner or later the whole room is in hysterics.
- Switch channels. Take a minute to think or write about why you are selling in the first place, what you want people to experience when they talk with you, and how you will feel when you serve them and then keep going until you make your goal.
What are your Ghostbusting tactics?
SOUL OF SELLING GHOSTBUSTERS: 6 Ways to Blast Negative Mental Chatter
3 favorite tactics: 1. First, gratitude time. Thanks so much for everyone, especially Carol Costello, who has seen how difficult it is to sell the work of the heart from the heart and how to sell gracefully. Thanks for the support, the resources, the techniques in your book. Thanks for everyone who helped me create my work. Thanks for the challenge and the many supporters.
2. A vision of fantastic results from a few hours of successful selling. I imagine how it feels, from the tips of my toes to the top of my head, to have connected more deeply with people I know or to have made new connections. I feel the joy of listening to people’s needs and hearing their relief when my need for work perfectly matches their needs for service.
3. I tolerate the frustration of the gap between now (scared, tongue-tied or whatever) and then (grateful for the additional work). I stop obsessing about how I will get there. It’s as if I put the problem in the back of my creative brain, tell it, “you take care of it” and go about my business, one small task at a time.
This post made it clear that I’ve got to do ghostbusting before and during all marketing and selling work. Those pesky ghosts pop up everywhere. Might as well have fun with them. Thanks so much, Carol!
Thanks, Pat, for your very generous comments and your excellent ideas! Wonderful Selling Ghostbusters!
Wow! Excellent advice, Pat, and eloquently stated!
Honestly, I don’t really know what it is about these but I enjoy them. It does seem a bit silly from an objetcive standpoint. Hey, lets sit around for 40 mins and listen to a guy answer movie trivia!: But it is interesting for some reason. So yeah, keep making these, with one caveat. I, like the others, love the videos you make. Obviously the video trivia ones were more interesting than just this audio. But that aside, we do all love your AVGN, movie reviews, and whatever else you put out. If you like doing these and are going to just sit around and do it anyway, you may as well keep recording and posting them. But I think we hope that it doesn’t detract from your other projects