Are you the 'Big I Am'?

You must put your ego aside and show humility to optimise your sales, says GUY ANASTAZE

Ego, from the Latin personal pronoun, usually describes one’s self-awareness. Ego is often considered (especially in psychology) to be the foundation of personality, and sometimes (notably in spirituality) as an obstacle to personal development. Here, I will discuss Ego from the second perspective, distinguishing it with a capital E and referring to what one commonly calls “a big Ego”.

This Ego causes chaos. Ego is pretension or belief that you are better than others and worth intrinsically more than they are. Positioning yourself by comparison to others, the Ego can be a substantial obstacle to self-development and reaching your full potential.

Unfortunately, the management of political, military and religious systems, and many other organisations, relies on the Ego. This is one of the reasons that these systems lead to war, whether physical or economic; the Ego is the breeding ground for what psychologists call narcissists, perverts or psychotics.

In sales, the Ego becomes a flaw when a salesperson judges that they know what is good for the client better than the client themselves. This flaw manifests itself as arrogance and it leads to failure. Arrogant salespeople talk too much and don’t listen, believing they already know and understand in the place of the client.

The Ego is often closely associated with ambition. I’d like to make a key distinction here between these two concepts. My view is that ambition sets the bar very high, helping you both to build your dreams and to shape your conviction such that you can achieve them. Relying on the conviction that you are capable, ambition does position you compared to where you are now; it leads you to say “I can do it,” acting as a positive energy which motivates you to strive to do better by working with others.

To win business in sales, you need to advance with your team and alongside the client, collectively building the best solution to meet their needs. Ambition, then, is the booster of excellence. Ego is the destroyer of excellence.

HARNESS HUMILITY Humility reminds us that we are not perfect, that we are perfectible. Associating strong ambition with great humility is one of the best ways to develop yourself and achieve your goals. It helps you to learn, to take a step back from your

certainties, question your intentions and beliefs, and to listen to and identify with others.

Professional advancement tends to follow a pattern of S curves. Entering a discipline as a junior, we progress to the level of advanced professional as we continue to practise, ultimately becoming senior when we fully master it. If at this moment on the curve we stagnate, the curve could invert and we may descend along with it. Between the end of the Second World War and the middle of the 1980s, an entire career could span a single S curve, each phase lasting around five to 15 years.

Today, these curves last about five years, with each phase lasting between one and two years. We are obliged to have several mini careers, and humility plays a crucial role in moving between each S. From “master” we must become a beginner leaving our senior position for a junior position in the next curve. We must unlearn to progress to a new position, abandoning in part

“The Ego becomes a flaw when a salesperson judges that they know what is good for the client better than the client themselves”

what we know to gain new knowledge and skills. We must “let go” in order to get ahead. The bigger our ambition, the more S curves as we pursue new opportunities for growth and development, and for new challenges and responsibilities. The speed of moving from one S to another will depend on our humility. The better you develop your humility and tame your ego, the better you known your goals, the smoother your rise towards those goals will be. Certain companies don’t give us the choice, of course, forcing individuals recognised as having high potential to follow this pattern. It is what one of my mentors at IBM called “to be subject to strategic discomfort”. There is a popular saying in sales: “People buy from people they like.” Certainly there’s some truth in this saying, but the better formulation would be: “People buy from people they trust.” You can inspire respect, admiration, even favour without

GUY ANASTAZE is an expert in business efficiency, behavioural and relational aspects of business performance, and improving the customer experience. He spent 30 years in sales management at IBM and is author of Authentic Selling: How to boost your sales performance by being yourself, where he explores ‘selling by coaching your customer’. Visit: www.theauthenticsellingbook.com

inspiring trust, and without trust you will be unlikely to close deals. The importance of trust is one of the reasons selling is sometimes viewed negatively, too many people having placed their trust in someone only to be let down. Developing a well-deserved position of trust – built on the repetition of day-to-day events and actions designed to reinforce this trust – is therefore essential.

Trust is founded in three main components: sincerity, respect and empathy. Sincerity lets your client know that you firmly believe in what you’re proposing; they may not always agree with you, but they can count on you to tell the truth. This starts an honest, open dialogue. Respect creates a protected interpersonal space for your clients, enabling and encouraging them to reveal themselves and allowing confidentiality to be established. Empathy – the ability to mentally and emotionally identify with others – promotes a compassionate communication environment, reinforcing the protected space established by respect. The true nature of empathy is not to put yourself in the client’s place and state that “If I were you, I would do X”, but instead to ask yourself, “What could I do if I were the client?”

If trust is a magnificent and delicate structure, patiently built from the bricks of sincerity, respect and empathy, it is essential that the Ego does not add the least bit of dynamite. Practising sales like an arm wrestling match is one of the best ways to break down trust. The pressure of short-term targets and the expectations from management and shareholders can make us lose the sense of reality that is critical to remaining grounded and sincere.

SUPPORT CLIENT CHANGE All purchases represent an act of change, impacting to various degrees your interlocutor, their team, department or overall company, their budget, habits etc. The sale thereby becomes a disruptive act for your client. All change requires letting go of the present and putting faith in the future. So it is natural that sales comes up against resistance, and the best way to overcome this is to let your client understand the necessity of this change, supporting them as they become aware of the benefits for them, their team or company and helping them to identify the option or solution best suited to them. Ultimately your goal is to make the client autonomous in making their final choice. Winning deals like this requires empathy. It requires the salesperson to act with humility and to demonstrate leadership.

To preserve trust and get further ahead, be ambitious, but let go of your Ego. This will provide the foundation for genuine partnership.