Fine-tune your thinking to become more successful at sales

In these difficult economic times, everyone is feeling the pinch. Legal professionals need to be able to sell themselves more than ever, to show what differentiates them from their competitors and to use sales techniques to retain and win new clients.

In many professions, there is an issue around the thoughts, feelings and beliefs conjured up by the word ‘selling’. This is where a change of mindset can be very helpful, a reframing in psychological terms.

Rather than think of it as selling, partners should think of it as the process of finding new clients with legal problems that they can help to resolve, and of keeping clients happy. By challenging mindsets, the lack of motivation commonly associated with doing something partners don’t feel comfortable with can be addressed.

There is no need for lawyers to feel uncomfortable with sales. The skill sets used for sales has much in common with the skills set used for practising law, such as questioning, critical reasoning, debating and negotiating. These skills are used daily in both activities, so, with a bit of flexibility and creativity, they can be transferred from use in the legal profession to utilisation in business development to great effect.

Self-coaching

One approach that has been proven to be very effective in changing mindsets is structured self-coaching. Just like a series of real face-to-face coaching sessions, this involves clarifying what the person wants to change, then identifying, exploring and overcoming the psychological barriers to achieving the goal, followed by creating an action plan to implement it.

Take the example of: “I want to feel more confident when trying to get a retainer client to sign on for another year.” A common barrier might be the belief that, if you can’t get them to sign straight away, you don’t know how to negotiate and you’ll inevitably lose the client as a result.

This sort of thinking is obviously unhelpful and, if left unchecked, results in a reduced motivation and ability to recover quickly from challenges, and lower sales.

Thought challenging

A thought-challenging approach is particularly effective in breaking this sort of thinking pattern and involves asking four specific questions.

Take for example the belief: “I must be able to immediately answer any question that is asked of me in a presentation, or I will look stupid and we will lose the prospective client as a result.”

1. Am I making any thinking errors, such as emotional labelling, magnification or ‘should’ statements?

There are a common set of unhelpful thinking patters that we all fall into from time to time. These include: emotional labelling, magnification and ‘should’ statements. In this case, there is evidence of all three.

The word ‘stupid’ is an emotional label attached by magnifying the consequences of not being able to answer a question immediately. The ‘I should be able to’ belief implies that there is some golden rule that is being broken.

2. What is the evidence for and against this thought or belief? How accurate and helpful is this thought?

Do all effective presenters really know the answer to every question that the audience might ask of them? Partners should consider how they really know this, what proof they have and if they have asked any accomplished presenters if it is true.

3. What are the other ways of looking at this situation? How might others interpret it?

What would happen if you said “I’m not certain of the answer, but I’ll get back to you within 24 hours?” or if you asked if anyone else in the team had any opinions on the question? Creatively generating several options at this stage is always useful, to be able to pick one and give it a try.

4. What am I going to do to bring about different results?

If you do nothing, you’re very likely to get the same results, so you need to work out how you’ll think, feel and behave differently next time to bring about different results.

This structured approach, together with ongoing reinforcement and practice, really does help people to fine-tune their thinking and behaviour to be more successful in sales. In fact, using these techniques has been shown to result in 20 per cent more people reaching or exceeding their sales targets, compared to a control group who don’t use them.

The techniques are easy to learn in principle, but the best way to make them become long-term habits is to practise and reinforce them over a period of several weeks, as old habits die hard and don’t go away without a fight.