That’s Not Who We Are! Or Are We?

“You know, our people are not born salespeople,” said a CEO in a conversation about increasing sales.

You’ve probably heard such carelessly dropped sentences in your own environment—or even said them yourself: “I’m not like that!” or “We’ve never been good at that.”

The problem is that you are not defining the situation but rather your expectations for the future. If you believe that your team cannot sell, then that will be the case regardless of the people’s actual abilities.

Here’s the big thing: your identity, your team’s identity, and your entire company’s identity have been created over time, and what’s been created can be recreated and changed. But you have to work on it consistently. 

Here are three important steps to change your identity:

1. Find insight. You have to give yourself and your team the insight that we all create our paradigms and beliefs. Nobody is just “that way”; rather, we are all as we have defined ourselves to be. Most of us deprive ourselves of possibilities by believing that we are somehow in a fixed state that can’t be changed. The same applies to teams.
2. Set an intention. The next step is to define the future identity: Who do we want to be? What does that mean exactly? How does someone behave with this identity? Bonus tip: role models can help a lot with this step.
3. Initiate the change. The difficult thing is always the initial spark. In the beginning, we fight against massive habit changes, and failure is seen as confirmation that changing is bad. (“The first ten sales talks did not lead to a deal. I always said I wasn’t a salesman!”) The maxim is to keep going!

If you want or have to work on the winner identity of your team, just give me a call: +41445862707