Confidence for the win

You will never make your prospects confident in you if you aren’t confident in yourself.

As you discuss a prospect’s needs, you must be confident in addressing those problems and delivering improved results. (Photo: peshkov/Adobe Stock)

Selling is a transfer of confidence. Salespeople work to give prospects and existing clients confidence that by working with them, they will get better results than if they don’t.

Of course, you will never make them confident in you if you aren’t confident in yourself.

Related: An inconvenient sales truth

To reach your growth potential, you must stay focused on the sources, build them to a potent level, maintain that level, and share that confidence with others.

Kevin Trokey is founding partner and coach at St. Louis-based Q4intelligence.

Client impact

As you discuss a prospect’s needs, you must be confident in addressing those problems and delivering improved results.

For most of the problems faced by your prospects, you have solutions at your disposal. There was a time when having these solutions was enough to provide a level of confidence, but times have changed. Now, these solutions are merely the ante to the game.

Unfortunately, the way most producers use these solutions hasn’t changed. They load them into their capabilities presentation and drone on about all the stuff they provide clients as if they were special.

Merely having the solutions doesn’t mean clients will ever benefit from their impact; most of the time, they don’t.

When delivering these solutions to clients, most producers/agencies will do nothing more than hand out usernames and passwords to a website, leaving the client on their own to figure out how to use them. It’s impossible to be confident discussing a solution when you know it will never make the needed impact.

To be confident in your ability to deliver that impact, you need to understand your solutions well enough to have meaningful conversations about the problems you can solve with them. Second, once you identify that a prospect is suffering from that problem, you must drive the solution’s implementation to ensure the solution is used effectively and the problem is fixed.

While your competitors are merely talking about the products they offer, you will confidently have conversations about the problems you can solve.

Tell a better story

You compete in a world where most buyers believe insurance brokers are all the same. It has to be painful to sit across from a buyer and watch the “here we go again” realization set in. At that point, you have lost them. Even if you have the greatest strategy they have ever heard, it quickly becomes the greatest strategy they never heard once they tune you out.

Change the conversation. Change the game. Change the outcome.

To win more often, stop talking about yourself and start asking about them. Take the time to learn about what they want to accomplish through their benefits program. Slow down enough to understand what it is about their current situation that is holding them back.

With that understanding, you can confidently lay out a plan to systematically move them to where they want to go.

Maintain a healthy pipeline

If you don’t have a healthy pipeline of prospects, the other areas of sales confidence don’t matter. Your ability to have a more impactful sales conversation is irrelevant if you don’t have anyone to share them with.

It should be a privilege to have the opportunity to work with you.

However, when your pipeline is healthy, everything you do is more effective and impactful. You control the conversation and guide the prospect comfortably forward. You don’t chase the wrong opportunities. You bring an assertive tone to the conversation that allows the buyer to find confidence in you and what you share.

Confidence is contagious

When you know you can deliver a meaningful impact on their business, when your sales conversation focuses on improving their story, and when you have a healthy pipeline of interested buyers, you are bound to be confident.

To break the gravity that holds prospects in place, you have to introduce a force that is even more powerful. We’ve all experienced it. There are few forces with an attraction stronger than confidence.

Go be(come) the confident force your prospects and clients need!

Read more: