Exactly How to Sell

2The Quest for Confidence

For you to have picked up this book and got this far, my guess is that you never set out to work in sales, but through an alternative skill, passion, or opportunity you have found yourself with the need to become more skilled in the area of salesmanship to support your core profession.

Perhaps the most important attribute to demonstrate in the world of sales is that of confidence, yet when your experience is low in this area, you can easily find yourself ill equipped for the task at hand. If you've never done something before, how can you expect to be confident in it? Knowing how important confidence is and knowing that it's an essential part of success, throughout my career I've studied exactly how confidence is created.

To find confidence in something, you need to move through three steps in your experience that are associated with that very thing:

1. Knowledge. The first thing you need to become more confident is a base level of understanding or knowledge about the thing in question.

   Let's take, as an example, a trivial task. Being British‐born, I will use the example of making a cup of tea. The first thing you would need to do is to gain knowledge of the components that go into tea making, the techniques associated with it, and the different methods of producing the finished cups. You could watch videos, read manuals, and observe others to grow your knowledge of the art form and learn various methods. This step is essential, yet it will only take ...