Selling Boldly

2The Massive Cost of Fear in Sales

If you sell, fear has probably cost you, personally, millions of dollars.

If you work for a company that generates $5 million in annual revenue, fear has cost your firm tens of millions of dollars over the years.

If the company is a $20 million business, fear has cost the firm hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. And if the company does $100 million annually, the total lost is in the billions.

But this is just individual firms. If we think about the sales lost across industries, or neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations, over years and decades, we're talking about many trillions.

This includes the immense amount of money salespeople have lost out on in take‐home pay and in vacations not taken; the losses to the local economy not injected with this money; the investments businesses have not made, thereby hurting their suppliers; and the customers not helped.

I know the impact of fear on sales because I've worked with hundreds of companies and thousands of salespeople on the topic of revenue growth.

My clients add 10 to 20 percent, and often a lot more, to their sales growth annually. We accomplish this by systematically making the simple communications laid out in Part IV.

But we don't start there with my clients (nor in this book); we start with mindset. Because how you think, how you deal with fear of rejection and failure, is how you sell.

It is impossible to outsell your mindset.

If you are confident and optimistic and bold, ...