I started the How to Sell Yourself cohort series when, independently and within weeks of each other, two friends asked me for advice and mentorship on self-promotion. I’m not an extraordinary salesman or self-promoter, so I declined “mentorship” but suggested we get on a Zoom call to discuss and share ideas about selling.
That single Zoom call led to more, and eventually to me compiling the curriculum for How to Sell Yourself. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve run two 10-week cohorts through the program.
We’re a few weeks into the current How to Sell Yourself cohort, and last week I changed the curriculum on the fly.
I start the workshop with a segment on “Sales as Service,” drawing on Danny Meyer’s reinvention of restaurant service with Setting the Table, Will Guidara’s recent sensation Unreasonable Hospitality, and my own restaurant experience.
I start with redefining sales as service because it’s an unusual place to start a discussion about selling. Service is the opposite of stereotypical selling and one of the big differentiators in how I approach sales.
The second week is about the attitude of a great salesperson, which I encourage everyone to define for themselves, but for me includes love, presence, and acceptance. Instead, we spent the second week of this cohort discussing habits and behavior change!
Behavior change applies to sales in two ways:
- Our own behavior – if we can develop better habits and change our behavior, we’ll learn faster and thus sell more.
- Others’ behavior – when we understand behavior change, we’re more likely to sell in ways conducive to getting what we want.
Every sale is an effort to change behavior – whether your customer’s or your own. Predominantly, though, I focused on habits and behavior change in order to help my students become better learners. As reluctant salespeople, we learn more quickly and are more likely to keep improving.
I asked cohort members to watch this TEDx talk by Stanford behavior designer BJ Fogg. BJ articulates the two things necessary to adopt a new habit:
- Make the habit tiny
- Celebrate your successes
(Now, if only change were as easy as that sounds…)
Make It Tiny
Common advice about habits is that if you want to run more, leave your running shoes out ahead of time. That makes it easier to start by changing the environment around the desired behavior, but it doesn’t make the success of the habit smaller. What if we called success just stepping outside the door? Or running just the length of the block? What if success was sending one email?
There are always ways to set your objectives smaller. This isn’t a lack of ambition. Doing so makes success easier, and thus easier to repeat.
Celebrate Your Successes
I’ve written previously on the unexpected benefits of celebration. BJ describes a handful of different celebrations like doing a little dance or pumping your fist in the air. Celebration is uncomfortable; we have a cultural bias towards self-critique.
As with dog clicker training, the key is that your celebration has to immediately follow your behavior. You don’t trigger the dopamine of positive reinforcement if you wait a few hours and reward yourself with a nice dessert.
Tiny Habits of a Great Salesperson
I left it to my cohort members to apply these two principles of behavior change to their own work in sales, but here are a few suggestions:
Make It Tiny:
Most reluctant salespeople don’t sell because they make their metric of success too big. While selling rewards persistence, most people define success to mean something so far from where they are that they never get started.
Instead, tiny selling can mean:
- Make one clean ask per week.
- Write one short email.
- Send one “thank-you” note or follow-up after a conversation.
Celebrate:
Traditional salespeople are actually quite good at celebrating. At Zander Media, we have a Slack channel that notifies my team when we sell a ticket to Responsive Conference.
The problem is that most sales teams celebrate only a successful sale or meeting their quotas – not the small steps along the way.
Instead, celebrate the little things:
- Physically celebrate (smile, exhale, fist pump) after every phone call.
- Pat yourself on the back after a single difficult client conversation.
- Say out loud, “That was a good ask!” every time you ask for anything.
One of my students, an HR executive-turned-coach, shared that she’s begun celebrating herself after meetings where her only focus is on helping the person she’s with – even if they don’t turn out to be a good fit for her practice. She found herself enjoying meetings, as a result.
As an added benefit to the practice of celebrating, the group now sweetly celebrates others throughout our Zoom with fist pumps and rocketship emojis.
Behavior Change – and Sales
Across the 100 or so books I’ve read about sales and persuasion, there isn’t much about about habits and behavior change. That’s an oversight.
I’m coming to believe that anytime anyone is teaching anything, they ought to start with a segment or two about learning. When we can help people become better learners, they’ll learn more of what they’re there to practice.
This last week was the first time I’ve applied two principles of behavior change to the topic of sales, and this article just scratches the surface. But, at a minimum, anytime we make our habits smaller and celebrate successes, we’re more likely to succeed.