Change the way you think to transform your sales results

Hello Sales Reset Community

What will make the biggest difference to your sales results: changing what you do or changing the way you think?

This week’s newsletter is all about choosing the values and mindsets that will make you more successful in your Sales Reset selling.

This is a massively important topic and has the potential to transform your sales results!

Here’s what to expect this week:

1. What do we mean by values and mindsets?

2. Examples of recommended values and mindsets.

3. Practical Exercise: Choose one value or one mindset to focus on intentionally this week to improve your sales results.

How you'll improve sales results this week

• What are values?

• What are mindsets?

• How to improve your values or mindsets this week

• Potential Challenges

• End of Week - Reflective Practice

What are values?

Values are the core beliefs and principles that guide a salesperson's behaviour and decision-making. They are deeply ingrained and often reflect what is most important to an individual or organization.

It’s likely that to some extent, your values have been shaped by conventional sales training that promotes:

• Prioritise Winning The Business: Conventional sales training states that the top priority is getting the order, not prioritising likely outcomes for customers.

• Overcoming Objections: Conventional sales training aims to make salespeople more persuasive, not to make them more effective and collaborative facilitators.

• Customer Success? - Not My Job: Conventional sales training states that the salesperson’s job is to win the business before handing it over to their customer success and operational colleagues.

In his book, “Selling Transformed: Develop the Sales Values which Deliver Competitive Advantage”, Dr Philip Squire recommends these values:

• Authenticity: Being genuine and true to yourself in sales interactions.

• Client-Centricity: Putting the customer's needs and interests at the forefront of the sales process.

• Proactive Creativity: Being innovative and forward-thinking in the sales approach, challenging existing knowledge of the customer's business and focusing on the customer's experience.

• Tactful Audacity: Having the courage to challenge customers' thinking or present new ideas, but doing so in a respectful and considerate manner.

Within our Sales Reset community of practice, we emphasise:

• Customer Success: Prioritizing customer’s achievement of measurable success with the products and services they buy.

• Multiple Stakeholders: Identifying all the key stakeholders and their priorities is crucial, even though it makes agreement harder.

• Collaborative Proposals: A belief that proposals will improve when developed collaboratively, even though collaboration processes require significantly greater skills.

Values serve as the moral compass for sales professionals, influencing how we interact with clients, colleagues, and stakeholders. They’re relatively stable and consistent over time, providing a foundation for building trust and long-term relationships.

It takes sustained effort to change values. But it’s worth it, and it can be done!

What are mindsets?

Mindsets, on the other hand, are the attitudes and mental frameworks that influence how we perceive and respond to situations. Mindsets are more dynamic and can be developed and adjusted over time more readily.

Here are some examples of mindsets:

• Value Co-Creation Mindset: Seeking to co-create value with customers generously throughout a selling conversation, regardless of whether or not they buy from you.

• Growth Mindset: Believing in the ability to develop skills and improve through effort and learning. This mindset encourages resilience and adaptability and is the opposite of a Fixed Mindset.

• Realistic Mindset: Being grounded in reality, making decisions based on facts and evidence rather than wishful thinking.

• Long-Term Thinking Mindset: Focusing on building lasting relationships and providing ongoing value rather than just closing immediate sales.

• Resilience Mindset: Everybody in selling roles must develop a mindset of growing resilience to manage the frustrations and setbacks that are an inevitable part of a selling career.

Mindsets shape the approach and strategies that we use to achieve our goals. They influence how we handle setbacks, adapt to changes, and interact with our clients and colleagues.

How to improve your values or mindsets this week

1. Review the lists of values and mindsets in this newsletter.

2. Choose one value or mindset that, if you make the effort, has the potential to deliver the best improvement.

3. Take a few minutes to write down one specific intention for the week related to that value or mindset, for example:

   • Chosen Value or Mindset: Customer Success

   • Intention this week: My intention this week is to seek to clarify the measurable success outcomes customers are seeking in every conversation.

4. If you have the opportunity, it will be highly valuable to discuss this exercise with your sales team leader. They might help you choose the most significant value or mindset and clarify the most suitable intention for the week.

5. At the end of the week, reflect on how you lived up to this intention and what you learned.

Potential Challenges

Thinking about values and mindset is hard: Many people in selling roles are doers, not thinkers. They’d prefer to crack on with highly practical tasks. They might not find it easy to think about how they think!

Changing values and mindsets is hard: If thinking about values and mindsets is hard for some people, changing their values and mindsets is much harder! The way you think has developed over many years. These thought processes are habitual and “normal”. Changing how you think habitually will take significant effort.

Remembering to change values and mindsets is hard: Because thinking is habitual, the only way to make changes is through sustained and deliberate practice. The best way to remember is to make notes that pop up and remind you!

End of Week - Reflective Practice

At the end of this week, ask yourself these key questions:

We hope you’ve found this Weekly Sales Reset valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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Community of Practice

Ask Questions, Share Your Experience

If you have any questions or experience to share:

• LinkedIn Group - Join our World-Class Customer Success Selling Group on LinkedIn to ask questions or comment.

• Sales Reset Together Community - Click here to learn more about our private community of members committed to achieving and maintaining their Sales Reset.

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