Start Smiling! Optimism Techniques for Inside Sales Reps

How often do you hear someone say, “Optimism sells.” How about, “Be more optimistic!” In sales, optimism is essential for success. But just saying the words won’t do the trick; you need to train your mind, using cognitive techniques. You need the tools to actually practice optimism.

To help Inside Sales managers and their teams, we produced a free success guide called “The Way You Think Affects the Way You Work: Optimism for Inside Sales Reps.” This document outlines the benefits of optimism and the drawbacks of pessimism in the sales environment, consulting marketing scientists and psychologists like Martin Seligman, Peter Schulman and Gordon Badovick. It also features some of AG Salesworks’ own managers.

What this guide gives you is 3+ pages of defensive and offensive techniques for becoming a more optimistic person in the inside sales environment. Essentially, it’s not just about why you should be optimistic; it also focuses on how to be optimistic.

Here’s a glimpse of what kind of tips you’ll be able to read in this guide.

1. Celebrate your successes. Did you just close your first deal? Did you finally reach the right representative for your product? Reward yourself with a fancy lunch or a weekend at the beach. This will teach you to focus more on your successes than your failures.

2. Use a thought-stop­ping technique such as snapping a rubber band on your wrist or focusing on your surroundings if you start to recognize pessimistic thoughts creeping in when you’re nervous about a call or about giving a new presentation. To keep your mind away from pessimistic thoughts, play mental counting games like counting backwards from 100 by increments of 7, recall a success, or imagine a pleasurable experience.

3. Don’t make excuses for yourself. Accept self-defeat. Then, motivate yourself to work harder. Thus, practice realistic optimism, the opposite of blind optimism. Take control and responsibility of your actions, fix solutions and expect the best out of future situations, aiming to succeed.

4. Make goals for yourself every day. Keep a to-do list and relish being able to cross off items on it. Actually complete the goals. This will cultivate a sense of achievement, even if not all the goals are as big as closing a deal.

5. Smile more. It can actually make you feel happier. Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman proved in a scholarly article that smiling influences cardiovascular and affective responses to stress (the people in their study who wore a genuine smile had a lower heart rate than those who had a neutral or standard smile), proving both physiological and psychological benefits. By transmission of moods, your smile will make your prospect feel happier as well.

To read more about optimism in the workplace, download our free success guide here.

Let us know what you think at our Twitter feed with the hashtag #Optimism or by commenting below.