Who Stole Your Sales Mojo?

By Keith Rosen, MCC
The Executive Sales Coach™

Your sales mojo encapsulates the inner game of selling, which is who you are and how you present yourself when speaking with others.

Your sales mojo is the energy or presence you emit during every meeting with a prospect. It’s that allure, charisma, or vibe that you exhibit and that every one of your prospects feels from you.

Developing your sales mojo goes beyond the basics of learning a presentation, selling strategy, or pitch, which is what superficial sales training is capable teaches you.

While an experienced, certified sales coach can assist you in uncovering and developing your authentic sales mojo, the consequences of a blocked mojo can be severe. Just take a look at some of these limiting beliefs that prevent the natural flow of your mojo:

• “You can’t close someone in our business. They have to be ready to buy, and when they’re ready, they’ll call me.”
• “I’m not good at closing. I hate putting pressure on people.”
• “I’ve tried some closing tools before and they didn’t work for me.”
• “I had a horrible experience when I attempted to get the prospect to make a decision.”
• “I hate when people try to close me.”

Whatever the reason or the story, every salesperson, manager, and business owner has an opinion on what it means to close a sale and why they can or cannot do so successfully.

Here's a little personal history about your author. This happened shortly after I decided to become a coach. At this time, I’ve been coaching for about 16 years now, and I was one of the first sales and business coaches to hang my shingle, a true pioneer in the coaching profession. Being an innovator and a leader in this now rapidly growing profession of life and business coaching, I had to create my own road to achieve success, as there was no other proven path to follow. Being a leader in such a young industry certainly had its advantages. However, it also came with some tall challenges that needed to be eliminated.

At this point of this story, I had just sold my business. So, here I was with no income as I launched full steam into an unproven and unknown profession with only my experience in managing and owning several other businesses to guide me.

One thing was for certain. I had a very strong sales and marketing background. After all, when I owned my other businesses, I was the one responsible for the recruiting, hiring, training, managing and coaching of all our employees.

In an attempt to apply my wisdom, I came up with some great practices and developed what was to be my first of several attempts to put together my new selling strategy.

I started doing what I knew how to do: to pick up the phone and start making cold calls. To my surprise, I was very successful at getting through the door and into an appointment with the decision maker. Usually, these prospects met with me out of sheer curiosity. After all, no one had ever heard of coaching outside of athletic coaching. So, I had the advantage of positioning business and life coaching as something new and unique.

A month later, I wasn’t even making enough money to stay broke. Pitch after pitch, presentation after presentation, I kept hearing the same thing. “It sounds really interesting Keith but I just can’t see how we can apply this to what we’re doing right now. Stay in touch and maybe some time in the future we can look at this again. But hey, what you’re doing now sounds great . Good luck!”

Give Value

With all of the prospects that I had generated over the last month and with the results that I had experienced from my lackluster selling efforts, it was time to re-evaluate. So, I did what any new, intelligent, humble, and highly evolved coach would do. I called my coach for help.

And after I shared with her what I’d gone through, do you know what she told me? “Keith, you have to stop presenting and just give value.”

“What the heck does that mean?” I thought. Give value? Well, I took her coaching and put forth my best effort in deciphering what I thought she meant. I started thinking about how I could, as my omnipotent coach said, “give value.”

A funny thing happened: I stopped talking and started listening more. I stopped pitching and presenting and started asking better questions. Since my coach didn’t share with me a strategy to give value, by default, I had to figure out and uncover what value meant to each of my prospects. As the only way to uncover each prospect’s perception and definition of value, I needed to ask more questions.

Talk about one of those “Aha!” moments! My coach knew exactly what she was doing. Rather than deliver the same presentation or a revised presentation to every prospect, she opened up a new possibility for me to find out what value looked like from the eyes of every prospect, rather than from my own. What evolved was a process of inquiry and a defined set of questions that I used when meeting with each of my prospects.

The gem that I discovered very quickly when it came to selling my training and coaching services was totally counterintuitive. That is, you can’t sell coaching. Or at least not in the traditional sense of selling.

In other words, because coaching is about the investment in yourself and in your own personal or professional development, the client has to be ready and willing to be coached.

Either you are ready to generate substantial and unprecedented results both in your life and your career, willing to be accountable, honest, and proactive to achieve your goals, or you're not. Discovering this inspired me to develop an entirely different model - one that countered traditional selling.

I stopped trying to close and I started opening. The point I want to drive home is this: I’ve never had to close another sale again.

About Keith Rosen, MCC — The Executive Sales Coach
Keith Rosen is the executive sales coach that top corporations, executives, and sales professionals call first. As an engaging speaker, Master Coach, and well-known author of many books and articles, Keith is one of the foremost authorities on coaching people to achieve positive change in their attitude, behavior, and results. For his work as a pioneer and leader in the coaching profession, Inc. magazine and Fast Company named Keith one of the five most respected and influential executive coaches in the country.

If you're ready for better results quickly, contact Keith about personal or team coaching and training at 1-888-262-2450 or e-mail info@profitbuilders.com. Visit Keith Rosen online at Profit Builders and be sure to sign up for his free newsletter The Winners Path.