By Joe DiDonato | Chief of Staff | Baker Communications, Inc.
At one of our recent sales team meetings, our VP of Strategy, Development, and Growth played a Trevor Moawad video about an SAT Score Story that changed a person’s entire life. Trevor Moawad is the CEO of Limitless Minds and called the “Sports World’s Best Brain Trainer” by Sports Illustrated.
In that interview, Trevor retold a story that his father told him. It happened after his dad came home from a Toastmasters meeting. If you’ve never been to a Toastmasters gathering, it’s basically a local, regional, and national speaking group for anybody that wants to get better at speaking.
At this particular Toastmaster meeting, one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world told the story about his taking the SAT exams. He said that he was flunking out of high school, struggling, and was being raised by a single mom in the Midwest.
As luck would have it, he had promised his mom that he would take the SAT in May of his junior year. As he told the story, he said he wasn’t really expecting any great scores, and they told him that he would get his test scores later, in June.
For those of you unfamiliar with the SAT, there are two parts – verbal and math. Both are worth 800 points, for a maximum possible score of 1600. As this man was already failing out of school, he expected to bomb the test. But to his surprise, he tells his fellow Toastmasters that he got 1480 out of 1600. That’s right up there with the “best and brightest” who have ever taken the test.
So, he gets this amazing score, and his mom does what any mom would do that knows her kid well. She asks him how he cheated. He said he told her that he tried to cheat, but the way the test was constructed, he couldn’t cheat. So, his mom says, “You’re telling me you really got that score?!?” He said, “Yeah. I really got that score.”
The next thing that happens is that he realizes he’s smart, so in his senior year, he promises his mom that he’s going to start to go to all his classes. Sure enough, he starts going to classes, and he stops hanging out with the kids he did when he didn’t go to class.
The teachers see this and think that maybe they missed the boat with this kid. So now, the teachers start treating him differently. Fast-forwarding to the end of his senior year, he graduates and then goes on to a community college. When he graduates, he goes to Wichita State. And finally, he attends an ivy league college. He then goes on to become this massively successful magazine entrepreneur.
At this point, Trevor said that he was thinking, “Okay, this guy was always smart, and he just needed a standardized test to unlock it.” But his dad said ‘no.’ That’s not the story at all and told Trevor that this next part is the part that he really wanted him to listen to and understand.
So, his dad continued to tell him this entrepreneur’s story. He said that 12 years after all this guy’s success, he gets a letter in the mail from Princeton, NJ. He doesn’t think anything about it, but the next day, his wife asks him if he’s going to open the letter. He shrugs and says okay.
This is a true story. It turns out that the SAT Board will periodically review their test-taking procedures and policies. It turns out that the year he took the test, he was one of 13 people sent the wrong SAT score. His score was actually 740 out of 1600. His dad said that the successful magazine entrepreneur’s whole life changed when he started to act like a 1480 student. It was his actions that changed his outcome.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with the supportive belief competency. The fact is that your collection of beliefs will either support or sabotage your outcomes as a salesperson. What we do as sellers and managers is to accumulate these beliefs over time – through observation and experience. These beliefs are so entrenched in 86% of the salespeople out there, that they have become detrimental to their sales performance.
What do these beliefs sound like?
These are the stories that we tell ourselves over and over. Maybe you go to lectures on the Power of Positive Thinking, but it never resonates with you. Proclaiming positive intentions also seems to elude you. You’re not really sure that any of that works. In fact, being told to think positively tends to irk you to no end.
We all know the Henry Ford quote: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” But now, what the latest research is starting to tell us is that if you speak and act negatively, the outcome is magnified 10X. Think about that. You tell yourself you’re going to lose the deal. What do you do next? Do you abandon closing activities and drift off to find a new prospect? Do you not pay attention to the things you have to do in the final hours to bring the deal home?
That’s the power of your supportive belief system in action. Take a tip from this simple story about this very successful magazine entrepreneur. Start acting and behaving like you’re going to win. It will change your outcomes.
If you would like to learn more about using competency data to drive your hiring, training, and coaching efforts, we invite you to watch one of our recent webinars: How to Implement Data-Driven Sales Enablement. View the webinar for free here: https://www.bakercommunications.com/webinars/How-To-Implement-Data-Driven-Sales-Enablement.html.
