Selling Boldly

8Confidence versus Fear

The opposite of fear is confidence.

It should be no surprise that confident salespeople outsell fearful ones.

Confident humans outperform fearful ones. At work and also at life.

If you don't feel confident, talk to your happy customers, and ask them what their favorite things are about working with you. They will tell you. And it will be the absolute truth.

Confidence and fear are ways of thinking.

In the next chapter, we discuss boldness and meekness, which are the behavioral manifestations of these ways of thinking. That is, people who think confidently behave boldly, but people who think fearfully behave meekly.

So, how do confident salespeople think differently from fearful salespeople?

In almost every way.

But here are a few of the most important areas:

• The confident salesperson believes the customer is lucky to be hearing from her. The fearful one believes she is lucky the customer picked up the phone.
• The confident salesperson thinks it's highly likely he will get the business, because he is excellent, and the customer knows it. The fearful one thinks it's unlikely he will get the business. He is afraid he will not only miss out on this piece of business, but that the customer will fire him if he asks for the business at all.
• The confident salesperson believes the customer deserves to benefit from her great value, and that she owes it to the customer to offer him additional products, services, and value. But the fearful salesperson believes she ...