So as salespeople, we’re going out there. We’re closing deals. We’re looking for bigger deals. We tell ourselves, “You know I’m going after this client’s deal, I’m going to make that closing, I’m going to be fantastic, and we go out there to do that.” But, most salespeople do not succeed at doing that, and the question is why not? What holds us back? What unseen force stops us from taking the action? You know what, if I’m reaching a company that’s a $5M company, somebody in there, let’s say the VP of sales, and a $100M company, or a $1B company, it’s not really more difficult to get a hold of somebody from the $1B company because let’s face it, if you’ve got a $50M company, they’re pretty hard to get a hold of anyway.
But, the question is, what stops us from even attempting to do that. We’re doing it in a way that doesn’t give us the results that we want. What stops us is past events. Past beliefs that we created about money and about asking for money, about our worthiness, so when I’m doing a workshop, one of the things I do is I have these giant rubber bands, and I ask for four volunteers, and I get the first volunteer to come up and say, “You are five years old and you wanted to get this brand new bicycle and you asked your dad for it and your dad didn’t get you a brand new bicycle. He got you a hand-me-down from a cousin, and you thought that meant that you weren’t worthy of getting something new, and you might have made some beliefs around money, not spending the money to get what you want, and so the person thinks, “Okay, let me get the second volunteer to hold the rubber band and connect it to the first person, and it’s a giant rubber band, and as the person starts moving away, the rubber band starts tightening and becomes more and more difficult. So you say, “Okay now, you’re an executive of a company and you’re asking for a raise and your boss says no, no raise for you, you didn’t deserve it.” And that creates a belief around money. The second volunteer gets a rubber band and put it around the first person. Now this person has two rubber bands, and as they start moving away it becomes harder and harder, and ten they say okay! On the way to work, somebody cuts you off, and when you get to the office, you’re so angry that this person cut you off and then you obsess about it all day long and it influences all the things that you do, and I get the third person to put a rubber band around the person. It’s really difficult for them to move. I ask them, “The person that cut you off, maybe didn’t even realize they cut you off. The only person holding onto this is you, not them. Or, they’re really excited, that I cut someone off today. You should’ve seen his face when I did that, and they’re happy about it. They’re not fretting about it. But you are.”
Just as that past event, it’s not holding on to you, you’re holding on to it. What if you let that go, and when they do that, I remove the rubber band, and they get a bit freer. And what happens if your boss didn’t give you a raise. You’re holding onto it, they’re not. They don’t care about it. Let it go. And they let that go, and the rubber band’s gone, and they feel freer. And then the last one, your dad did the best he could, and you can buy a new bike any time you want. You can change that belief around money, and release that third rubber band and all of a sudden they feel light and when they start moving, they start moving a lot faster because there is no rubber band holding them back, so as you’re reaching out to large companies, mid-size companies, small companies, and if you’re pulling your punch in getting those appointments or asking for the deal, you need to take a look at what are the rubber bands that are holding you back in the past?, what are the beliefs that you created that stop you from getting exceptional results? That’s where you need to look for the answers. Certainly sales training is important and you need to figure out. But when I talk to sales trainers, they tell me that out of a 100 people that they train, 2 or 3 people really go out and do it. They set the world on fire and they do amazing things! There are a lot of people who wouldn’t do anything. It would be a nice day workshop for them but they don’t change a thing. They go back and do the same thing and be the same person as they were because they have got these things in the past that have these rubber bands attached, stopping them from achieving their results. If you want to really be set free, get all the energy back and take the world by storm, you need to figure out how to let go of those attachments from the past so you can be spectacular.
