Adopt and Express Humility to Increase Sales Effectiveness
Are you the kind of sales leader who often thinks: “I’m constantly dealing with idiots”? I get it, sometimes it can feel like you’re working on an island managed by six-year-olds. With that perspective, however, it’s likely that not only prospects, but your sales team, will view your self-assured behaviors as arrogant, forceful, and incapable of admitting mistakes. Climbing the organizational ladder requires an extraordinary degree of self-belief, which up to a certain point is seen as inspirational. Yet the most-effective leaders are the ones who don’t seem to believe their own hype. Instead, they come across as humble.
Striking a healthy balance between assertiveness and modesty, demonstrating receptiveness to feedback, and the ability to admit one’s mistakes, is one of the most difficult tasks to master. When things go wrong, sales talent seeks confident leadership. But they also hope to be supported and taught with humility as they work to improve the situation. To ignite this component of EQ, it is sometimes necessary to fake confidence. And even more importantly, it’s necessary to fake humility.
We live in a world that rewards people for hiding their insecurities. But the truth is that it is much more important to hide one’s arrogance. So if you want to make an impact on your sales performance metrics, learn to swallow your pride, pick and choose your battles, and look for opportunities to recognize others even if you feel you are right and they are wrong. Why? Because fake humility in sales is better than no humility at all. And like anything else, if you practice it enough, eventually you’ll get the feel for it.
For additional ideas on using Sales EQ to build a high performance sales team, get your copy of Igniting Sales EQ, available online at Amazon.
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