Sell yourself on you

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What makes you…you? Who are you, really? If it takes you more than five seconds to start describing yourself, you’ve narrowed down your biggest sales problem: you either don’t know who you are, or you can’t express it. And if you can’t express it to yourself, how are you going to effectively, consistently, persuasively communicate it to others to get results?

It may sound like a cliche, but it’s true. People size you up instantly—within seconds of your first face-to-face or phone-to-phone greeting. You’ve heard this before. They like you or…not so much. Period. Oh sure, you can “grow on them.” But that even sounds creepy. Who wants to be known as someone who grows on you? I don’t. I want rapport to be more instantaneous.

You just don’t have much leeway with people any more. So your first objective in sales—before ANYTHING else—is to be absolutely sure about who you are. How many sales training programs help you figure that out? (Though I’m not a huge fan of following a rigid sales “system,” I know of only one: Integrity Selling).

So, your assignment is this:

1. Give yourself some serious, quiet, downtime for a good hour. Even alone in your car someplace away from the rush of things.
2. Jot down random words you think of to describe yourself. Don’t stop at just two or three. But don’t complicate things, either, by writing down 20.
3. Finally, start turning those words into statements. A great start is to use “I am…”

I want to be careful not to give you a list that you’d be tempted to choose from here, so there’s no list of words. But here are a couple sample statements you can use:

• “I am totally organized and in control of things.”
• “I know what to do and when to do it.”
• “I never waste time—I’m always on top of things and committed to results.”
• “I love challenges and I never put off tasks or projects I dislike.”

This might sound like self-talk at first. But step two, to be covered in a future message, is crafting your who-you-are statements into what-you-do-best statements. But keep it basic at first. Be clear about who you are.

Now go sell something!