The Psychology of Selling: 5 Ways to Train Your Brain to Be Positive and Productive.

As a sales professional, you probably focus each day on your product and industry knowledge, selling skills, and building your pipeline. These are all extremely important to your success. However, there is something even more critical to ensuring your long-term success in sales: your mindset!

Your mindset is a great predictor of your outcomes

One of the biggest contributors to your long-term success in sales is belief in your own capabilities. You need the ability to quickly reframe your thinking after a series of negative sales calls. It has been researched and proven that reliving a bad experience several times per day strengthens that circuit in the brain, making each successive memory of the experience more debilitating. When we choose to dwell on the negative and what has gone wrong, we induce a crippling negative state, which strengthens the likelihood of extended poor sales performance. When we don’t recognize this mental dynamic, we can become stuck in a downward spiral.

Positive thinking worked for Martina Navratilova; it can work for you.

In a study performed at a tennis academy, researchers looked at what separated the top five professional players in the world from the next 20 ranked players. What they found is that it wasn’t their diet, training routine, coaching, or practice schedule that distinguished the best players in the world from the rest. What separated the top five from the next 20 was their thinking! In the 10–15 seconds after a poor shot, the best players quickly transitioned their thinking to things like “I love this game,” and “I didn’t get that shot, but I will get the next one”.

Representatives should be trained in understanding the phone systems so they can provide guidance on how customers can more efficiently get the help they need.

When you need an “attitude adjustment,” here’s how to go about it.

Shawn Achor has offered tips to train your brain to focus on happiness and positivity:

• Practice gratitude: This feeling of appreciation about your good fortune (regardless of scale) has been proven to release dopamine into your system at high levels. Practicing gratitude conditions your brain to find the positive in your experiences—and most experiences do have positive takeaways. A great way to harness this power is by writing down three things you are grateful for each day.
• Keep a daily journal: Write about a positive experience each day. Include details about what led up to the experience, how you felt about it, and how it impacted you for the minutes and hours that followed. The repetition of this activity and the re-reading of journal entries forces your brain into a prolonged positive state. Getting and remaining in this state is the result of conditioning, and journaling is a terrific conditioning activity.
• Exercise: Rigorous physical exertion results in the intake of more oxygen at faster rates. Oxygen is the natural antidote to cortisol, the unhealthy stress hormone. Exercise also produces endorphins in the brain, which are known to energize your spirit and elevate your mood. Research has also shown that exercise promotes neural growth, reduced inflammation throughout the body, and new activity patterns that promote feelings of calm and well-being.
• The details matter. After you have conducted customer and prospect interviews and compiled the information, you should see patterns start to emerge. These patterns form the basis of your buyer persona story. Everything from demographics to goals and pain points to where they find information matters in a buyer persona because it helps you develop a more effective marketing strategy.

Buyer persona best practices.

• You should have one to three buyer personas. If you’re trying to appeal to too many segments of your customer base, your sales and marketing efforts can become ineffective. Buyer personas are only useful if they’re used to frame personalized content that address a specific buyer’s concerns.
• Make interviews part of your standard on-boarding process. This makes buyer persona research easy for your team. Your customer experience and/or support team can use the interview as a touch point to check in on customers and see how they’re doing.
• The details matter. After you have conducted customer and prospect interviews and compiled the information, you should see patterns start to emerge. These patterns form the basis of your buyer persona story. Everything from demographics to goals and pain points to where they find information matters in a buyer persona because it helps you develop a more effective marketing strategy.