278: Four Powerful Japanese Mindsets For Sales

<p>Sales is a battle.  Not a battle with the buyer, although sometimes it feels like that when they won’t purchase from us.  The war is going on inside our own heads.  We have imposter syndrome telling us we are not good enough to do the job, even when we have some modicum of success.  We have the reverberation of negative self talk, telling us we are useless, when we fail to meet the sale’s quota.  The clients are beating us up on price, the sales manager is beating us up on results.  The vast majority of the time spent in sales sees us failing, being constantly rejected, losing revenues, losing clients, losing opportunities.  This is the battleground for our thoughts.  This year is my 51st year training in traditional karate and so let’s draw on four mindsets which are central to success in battle.</p> <p> </p> <p><em>Shoshin</em> – the beginner’s mind</p> <p> </p> <p>Our mindset when learning new skills is incredibly open.  We are keen, flexible, adaptable and hungry to improve.  We were like this when we first started in sales or when we started selling a new range of products or services for the first time.  As time progressed and our knowledge improved, our mindset shifted from how much can I learn, to how little can I do for the same result.  We are now looking for corners to cut, time to be saved, energy to be conserved.  We are busy people, so much of this makes sense, but as part of the package we also carry our bad habits around with us.  Some of those corners should not be cut, some of that time and energy should be deployed not saved.</p> <p> </p> <p>Each financial year we start again.  Let’s reinvigorate our beginner’s mind and go back to the basics of sales.  Let’s purge ourselves of the barnacle like bad habits which have attached themselves over the last year.  The beginner’s mind helps us to go back to zero and look at the whole picture again, in a fresh way.  “Knowing what I know now, how would I do things differently?”, is a genius level question, to help us get the success we seek.  Using the