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Head Trash and Why It Is So Important

Head Trash is the limiting beliefs you have. I have them, too. They're different from yours, but the effects are similar and bad, so we should talk about them.

A limiting belief is, foremost, an unconscious belief. You are not aware of it. If you were, it would not stick around very long: like fog in the sunshine, it'd "burn off" and you would be free of it.

And the worst thing about head trash is this: you don't suspect you could be a victim of it.

You're walking around with your point of view of the world...and you think it's 'normal,' the only way anyone could possibly see things.

"It ain't."

Head Trash and Your Point of View

The point of view you have at the moment is weird...individual..."site specific" if you will.

head trash man throwing liquor bottle away bad idea

We all have limiting beliefs. When you find one, and clear it, another takes its place higher up the perception spiral. I'm not sure we'll ever be free of them.

But we can definitely identify and clear out the limiting beliefs most weighing us down right now!

Imagine Pareto's Law, aka the 80/20 Rule, applied to your life:

A small number of decisions have the majority of the effect upon your life.

A small number of perceptive filters have a big effect upon your business.

The decisions are driven by the filters.

You act on what you believe to be true.

What you believe to be true is what you think is possible.

If you view yourself as "the janitor," you're not going to walk up to the CEO and propose a deal, are you.

Your perception of that role would be a limiting belief.

It's possible for someone to take on the job of janitor, but not identify with the role of janitor as their personality, you understand. But for nearly everyone, they'd get sucked into that view of themselves because of the role they took on.

And that would block them from doing this or that action because "janitors don't do that."

Are you starting to see what I'm demonstrating here?

Head Trash is a collection of limiting beliefs that stop you from doing what you'd really like to do.

How do you identify you've got head trash?

When you find yourself saying, "I can't do that"—usually to yourself—stop and ask yourself, "Why not?" Write the answers down. Review them: there's your head trash.

The Granddaddy of Head Trash: Money Tolerance

Money Tolerance is a critical limiting belief. It's a highly effective thermometer to tell you exactly how you're feeling about yourself at this very moment.

How much is "a lot of money" for you? Who told you that number? Where'd it come from? Because it's a BS story: thousands of people out there, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, believe whatever number you said is a tiny amount. (The typical range for the garden variety human is $500 - $2500, by the way.) If you believe the BS story that $2500 is "a lot of money," how on Earth will you ever invest in a $5000 program to help yourself or your business? And how will you ever sell a $5000 offer? You can't! You'll find ways to screw the sale up.

Fortunately, Money Tolerance is a head trash limiting belief, and the goal posts can be moved. Yes, there is a lower limit to Money Tolerance as well as the more visible high figure...I won't bother to sell $50 items, for example, because it's a "waste of my time and energy." (How many good money-making opportunities am I cutting myself off from because of that 'truth'? I well know making money is only about Traffic and Conversion, and if we can get those numbers high enough we can make plenty of money on a $50 offer. But somehow it's still a "waste of my time." Exploring this belief would open up possibilities to me that exist now, but I have cut off from my perception. See?)

When you find yourself blocked, self-painted into a corner, unable to proceed...ask yourself, "Why? What do I believe about this situation?"

Why can't you move to another city?

Why can't you start that business?

Why can't you approach this prospect?

I'll give you another example of head trash before we finish.

A Personal Example of Head Trash In Action

In the past year or so I've been working on getting into the Space field. To do that, I've been meeting, engaging with, and doing interviews with Space experts.

There's a guy who runs what I consider to be the best explainer channel on YouTube for Space, and the rapidly rising subscriber count echos that statement. But for a year, though I connected with him on Facebook, I didn't "feel right" about approaching him to be an interview guest.

Some limiting beliefs held me back.

I was only able to ask him a couple months back, and then had to wait around 45 days for the actual interview date to come around after we booked. I had to get another Space expert on my show before I could ask this person to be a guest.

Would he have been a guest much sooner if I had just asked outright? If I had simply been comfortable with asking him a year ago? Probably (we'll never truly know, but I strongly suspect so)!

But I felt I needed "credibility" first in this situation.

See how that held me back for at least six months from proceeding in the direction I wanted to move in?

That I needed "Space" credibility was my limiting belief. There's something about self-worth in this field, a gap that I believed I needed to make up before moving forward.

These things are not rational.

You may have a low money tolerance because as a small child you heard your parents arguing about a $600 washing machine purchase in one of those "listening at the top of the stairs" moments. That number got installed for you, as most head trash is. And for decades you've been walking around with this unconscious belief fueling the voice in your head that says, "That's a lot of money!" whenever you encounter a price at or above it. "Yeah," you reply to yourself unconsciously. "It sure is." And this drives your emotions and actions.

Identify that moment, clear it, replace it with something else (note that it'll be a NEW limiting belief: a higher figure of "That's a lot of money," but still a fake story you're telling yourself!), and your range of possibilities will expand.

Few things are more exciting than getting rid of head trash, and observing what you or someone you like can now imagine as possible.

>> Jason Kanigan is a business strategist. Book a call to discuss your situation with Jason using this link. <<

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Improving Sales Performance–Not As Easy As You Think!

Improving Sales PerformanceImproving sales performance is often thought of as a pushbutton solution by sales training clients. We'll just buy the training, the clients believe, and everything will turn out great.

The cautionary truth is the results are often lackluster. And there's a key reason why.

So is sales training a waste of money? Is it never going to have an impact on improving sales performance?

Whenever you hear an absolute like that ("always"..."never"), trainer Jason Forrest says it's time to start digging. Are absolutes ever always true in the real world? You mean to say every single one of the prospects you spoke with came back with that same response?!

Failure In Improving Sales Performance

In his experience with sales training failures, UK trainer Jonathan Farrington notes "the habit of many individuals to treat training as a CV builder, absorbing little but the most basic understanding of what was being taught and [how] a recipe for systemic low productivity is created". This is an amazing and disturbing statement, and I want you to read it again. "A recipe for systemic low productivity". Is that what you want in your organization? Do you feel the pit of doom opening in your gut?

All the trainers I have found commenting on this critical issue agree knowledge transfer is not enough to induce behavioral change. (Your 'Forrest Alarm' should be ringing, however!) Merely stating the skills in a lecture to the sales team will not result in better sales performance. The individual salesperson must adjust their behavior. Farrington's article on The Key to Why Sales Training Fails is good, but it misses the key idea that is the major stumbling block of most sales training implementations. We'll look at this idea in a moment.

Behavioral Changes Aren't Enough for Improving Sales Performance

Marketing and sales consultant John Graham gives a list of seven such behavioral changes. But here's the problem: without a change in BELIEFS, the salesperson is unlikely to alter their behavior.

I'm talking BASIC beliefs. All the way down to "Why am I selling this widget?" and "What does money mean to me?" "What does the prospect represent to me: a foe to be overcome, or a partner to be collaborated with?" "How much cash is 'a lot of money' to me?" These beliefs and others must be brought out into the light of conscious thought and understood for each member of your sales team--and if you're the company president, you too; selling is your job and you'd better start believing it.

The Secret to Improving Sales Performance

Sales training sticks--and sales transformation happens--when the sales team changes their belief about why they are selling. It's dead easy to change your behavior when you change your beliefs. Look at dieting. I'll bet you know someone who skinnied down successfully. And I'll also bet you know someone who tried dieting, but stayed at XXXL. Why was one individual capable of losing weight while the other was not? Changes in beliefs. Our now-thin friend started believing they could be thin. That too-large portions were bad for them. That more exercise was good and necessary. Our plus-sized buddy just couldn't make the jump.

Behavioral changes are obvious and straightforward to make once you have changed your beliefs. So instead of starting with behaviors in sales training, begin with looking at your beliefs. Make these match up with the results you want, and behavioral alterations will be simple...and the results will quickly follow.

>> Jason Kanigan helps organizations that know how to competently fulfill a product or service maximize their profit. Have a question about improving sales performance? Comment below to let us know! And please Like or Share to get this info in front of someone else you know it can help! <<

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Pricing: The Inner Game

Pricing: The Inner GamePricing has an inner game you as the salesperson are playing and frequently losing.

Two sales pros, Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale, bring their sales expertise on pricing to the fore with their weekly Advanced Selling Podcast. We've seen Caskey's contrarian approach to selling before, and Neale proved the depth of his knowledge to me this week in their episode on the inner game of Pricing: Part 1. This excellent discussion is less than 15 minutes and yet delves well into the head trash salespeople have about price.

Caskey begins with a powerful quote from writer DH Lawrence:

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?
If not, you will never really change.

Pricing Is About Our Mental Chatter

The two then have an excellent back-and-forth discussion about the mental game of pricing. Beginning with how nearly all salespeople enter sales conversations anxious about pricing, money, and the scripts in our heads of how it will turn out, Neale cautions you to take notice of this. These mental plays are not reality! They are our fears and concerns. How the conversation will really turn out is something else entirely...but it is heavily affected by the chatter going on inside our salesperson skulls.

Caskey answers by recommending you really detach: not just from getting the sale or not, but from what you've always thought about money.

Position yourself mentally, Neale rejoins--if allowed, you would charge more than you would normally charge. Begin with the belief that your offer is already worth more than you are charging.

At this point I was agreeing with most of what Neale had to say. However, I do not agree with the "discounting mindset" he mentioned. In my opinion, this is training your prospects to expect discounts. Consciously or unconsciously, you are telling them to demand the discount from you. If something really is worth $X, that's what it is worth! Why would you discount it?

From Caskey came a list of three simultaneous sales needing to be made. These oddly reminded me of the three impacts that occur in a car crash.

Pricing: The Inner Game and The Three Sales

These three sales are:

1 - to yourself (in your mind; do you believe this is a value and you would pay for it yourself?)

2 - to customer (standard selling)

3 - after the customer buys (fulfillment and upsells)

Caskey says #1 is the most important. If you don't have a philosophy about money, and how it exchanges for value, you are in trouble when it comes to pricing. And if you aren't conscious of what that philosophy is, it will lead you like a noose around your neck.

Listeners familiar with my training will notice Monetizing the Problem snuck in there: a $100K investment to fix a $1Million problem was a sensible sale.

Neale offers an Inner game philosophy for pricing:

Your involvement in this process is worth something--your expertise, value, experience. The value is not just in the Thing or the It or the specifications. YOU have a fee that comes along with the stuff you sell.

Your Personal Pricing Philosophy

Both pros ask: How does one get there if one doesn't already feel that way? The answer is mindset, not product knowledge. This is something sales training needs to focus more upon. Again, those familiar with my training know this is the first thing we work on. Selling is a conceptual, not technical, process.

Caskey adds that you can bring it up in a blatant way up front with your prospect. "I bring my value to these conversations; it's my purpose to make sure you make the right choice and get the right solution...it's up to you to figure out if you that value is worth it." I will add that the right solution for a prospect may be to do nothing...or get a competitor's offering because it truly is a better fit.

How other people buy is not how you buy. What they value is not what you value. What they think of as "a little bit of money" may be "a lot of money" to you. Yet these beliefs are either standing in the way of or helping you make the sale. If you are not conscious of them, they will hurt your results more often than not.

So when Caskey and Neale went into the idea of your personal money range for a specific product or service, which is head trash on money, it definitely caught my attention. If I offer you an Apple computer for $100, you are going to think something is off, aren't you. And if I say it's $10,000, you will probably say that's too much. There's the goalposts of your money range for that product. Neale invites you to check in with your own money range for the product or service you are offering, and notice those goalposts...and then inch up the top goalpost. "When I sell you a Mac, it IS worth $10K."

Will you have an answer to how the prospect should be thinking about value? You should have that answer ready...and that requires the philosophy behind it. What Caskey and Neale are saying here, essentially, is Know Your Own Game. Then you can tell prospects how other people in a similar situation think about the money part of this.

Oh, the phoenix? That's the title of the DH Lawrence book the quote is from.

>> Jason Kanigan is a sales force developer. If you want help with Pricing, book a time to talk with Jason. Was this helpful to you? Please Like or Share to let others know! And if you have a question about the internal game of Pricing, please comment below to let us know! <<