To work with customers, either selling or in customer service, you must believe in your products and services, in your company, and most importantly, in yourself. Your skills and your success depend almost entirely on your own self-confidence.

Other people sense whether or not you believe in yourself, and by extension, whether or not you believe in what you’re doing. It’s called the Doberman Principle – the dog will read those that fear them and become very alert to those people. The belief in yourself is a large part of the customers’ feeling persuaded that you can help them or that they should buy your product or service. Building your self-confidence will build your business and your success levels.

How do we build our self-confidence if we recognize a gap? If we believe we aren’t as good as others, or we don’t deserve to work with them? The Sandler principle of ‘Act As If’ is a great way to start. To change our belief system we start with a new belief and ‘act as if’ it were true, until it is true! For instance, perhaps over your desk you could post a positive affirmation that says: I am a doctor of customer service and anyone who calls in is fortunate to get me on the phone. Or, I’m a great problem solver and have the skills to rescue any customer from their product issues. Whatever you say, it must be in the first person, positive, strong and describe the person you want to be.

A positive affirmation alone will not get you to 100%. You must reinforce that belief with strong behaviors, by learning new techniques, by working on getting better and being better with customers, and by sometimes giving yourself a little slack. We are learning throughout our lives and we often do that through our mistakes. It’s not a failure unless we don’t learn something from it and do better next time.

Customer service and sales needs a strong self-esteem. They are also great places to begin to build one. We stay the same at our own peril.

Copyright 2012 Sandler Training and Insight Sales Consulting Inc. All rights reserved.

John Glennon is the owner of Insight Sales Consulting Inc, the authorized Sandler Training Licensee for the Interior of British Columbia. He can be reached at jglennon@sandler.com, toll free at 1-866-645-2047 or view his website at www.glennon.sandler.com