How to believe in what you are doing?

(5 minutes read)

In the last week’s blog, I mentioned how in sales, we could keep our authenticity. To remain authentic as a salesperson, besides all sales techniques and methods, you need to believe in what you are doing. You can always manipulate your customers by using different sales techniques (promotions, rebates, relationships, etc.) and it would work in the short run. Yet, in the long run, it will not make you stand out of the crowd and put you in a leadership position in what you are doing. It will just save your day, pay your bills, and bring you the promotion you always wanted. To become a real game-changer and a leader, you need to remain authentic, and to do so, you need to believe in what you are doing.

But, how to believe in what we are doing? It is easier when working for companies that have a clear purpose of existing, such as Apple, or an innovator start-up. What if we are a salesperson in an ordinary company, in an ordinary business that has barely its vision and mission statements. A company that is there simply to make money and pay its shareholders.

Contrary to the fad which claims that you should follow your passion and do it as a job, I claim that you should find something to believe in what you are doing and see if this can transform into a passion. When you look for something to believe in what you are doing, you can always find it. This can be the impact your products have on your customer’s business, the learning opportunity that you see in this job, your contribution to your colleagues, the way that you are doing the sales, the relationship you build with your customer, money… anything. The real trick is once you identify that, you need to build all your sales methods around this belief.

Let us take a concrete example from real life. A friend of mine got a job as a sales executive in a medium-sized packaged food company. The company was not a game-changer in its industry. It was not even the leader. If you did not know my friend, you would see it as a boring job in an ordinary company in an ordinary business… nothing exciting. However, my friend is not the type of sales professional who would go to work for such a company until he retires. He constantly looks for new opportunities to learn and grow, and does not hesitate to change the industry and even the country where he lives when necessary. When I asked him about his new job, instead of talking about the products (that he barely knew at the beginning) he was always talking about “the project” and how excited he was about taking part in this project. When I asked about the project, he told me how old the company was (it was an 80-year-old company), how their way of working was outdated, how the company survived during all those years with a great level of resilience as a family business. He believed that with the expertise, experience, and contribution he could bring in, he would be able to create a greater impact on the results with a relatively smaller effort. He saw the leverage and considered it as a great opportunity for his career. Even talking to me, he showed genuine attachment to what he was doing. Yet, he had nothing to sell to me. Funny thing is, even the CEO of the company who recruited him did not mention this situation as “the project”. But my friend believed in that, and he built all his sales approach on this belief and trained his sales teams accordingly. And it naturally worked with his customers. Because he believed in “the project”, he was perceived as genuine and authentic by his customers. As an experienced sales executive, when he added his knowledge and skills on top, success was inevitable. He was just flowing smoothly with his team and demonstrating significant growth. I am sure nobody understood how this happened. And most of his colleagues thought that he had some kind of magic or extraordinary skills. Or some might have thought that there is some kind of “secret ingredient”.  Yes, he is a skillful and experienced salesperson; and no, there is no secret. It is very simple. He just found something to believe in this particular company in this particular job and shared his vision with his team.

Still thinking that you have a boring job in a boring company. Just look around you… to find something that encourages you to do what you are doing. A small moment, a person, your paycheck, or an action… You will certainly find it because nobody works in a workplace without believing in something. It is simply a matter of discovering it. Once you have it you just need to transform it into a sales skill. That is it.