Anyone overcome social anxiety and become a high performing salesperson on here?

Bingo!

You will succeed when the pain of not succeeding becomes greater than the "pain" of your social anxiety. If you're not at that point right now, that simply means that you don't "want" it bad enough (and I say that with all due respect, because there have been MANY times in my own life where I haven't "wanted" it bad enough. Thankfully though, those days are getting further and farther between).

That said, I think that much of the social anxiety that comes from selling happens when you focus too much on, ummmm.... "selling" , and not enough on developing relationships. Cold-selling to total strangers = stressful. Making "recommendations" to someone who you have a warm, pre-existing relationship with = easy.

And it helps if you really believe in your product. A good rule of thumb is... if you would feel good recommending the product to your prospect even if you did not earn a single cent from doing so (in other words, if you believe that the product would truly benefit them / their business)... then you're on the right track.

Extremely shy growing up. Never went on a date, never went to a dance, never went to a school sporting event. I didn't even go to my own graduation.

So naturally, I went into sales.

"Sold" fire alarms for a few months. Never made a sale.
I decided to sell life insurance for Mutual Of Omaha. It was because of the TV show Wild Kingdom. I met an agent for that company that encouraged me. They turned me down...for a commission job....

I got a job at Monumental Life. I just started knocking on doors, because I didn't know any better. I assumed you should do that for at least 8 hours a day, because that was a normal work day in a factory.

By the end of the first year, I was the number 3 agent out of 2,200 agents.
I read a couple of books by a legendary insurance salesman, Ben Feldman, and just copied what he did, and worked very hard.

Then I bought an expensive vacuum cleaner, and got a job selling those. I actually started studying sales as a subject about then.

Five years later I was very good at it, and ten years later, I was very well known in the entire industry. For the last ten years, I've been a paid speaker at the industry trade show. I was the keynote speaker once.

I would walk into the room, and I'd hear a few people whisper "That's him".
But anyone can be great at selling, if you just continually work at getting better. Most salespeople just don't. They think selling is telling sports stories, or telling dirty jokes....or buying lunch. No. Selling is social engineering. I'm an engineer.

Now I write books on Selling & Marketing.

I'm still the same shy kid. I never learned how to enjoy groups of people. When I'm not selling, I mostly write or am pretty quiet at home, reading.
Most normal conversations, I avoid. Most people, I avoid.

But you don't have to be outgoing to be successful in selling. But you do have to be prepared. You do have to know how selling works, how people think, how to react a certain way.

I always just thought of it as a skill to learn. Like golf. But it's not. High level selling is like brain surgery. Every word counts, every gesture.

Anyone that says you can be great at selling in 3 easy steps is either lying, or only knows three steps. Anyway, that's my experience.

And I still can't dance.

I'll just leave this here as another perspective. If you push yourself and kind of get past that anxiety and start to do well, it is like anything, you have to keep up with it.

I was bullied relentlessly as a kid. I have often been the smartest guy in the room, and felt very out of place. I still do, though I'm far from the smartest guy in the room anymore when I'm often in a room full of people like on this forum. Anyway, I was just always a bit out of place, and believe me, I felt it inside.

I started telemarketing at 18 years old, and although I was petrified at first, I quickly grew into that role and loved it. I eventually was the guy getting up in front of a room of 30+ telemarketers, leading the organization. Who would have thought that I would be THAT guy? Not me.

A few years later that company decided that I was too young to fit the mold of the image that they wanted to portray, never mind the million dollars a month I was bringing in through my department in the home improvement industry. So, I was actually demoted back to telemarketer and asked to train the new, older manager. I left instead. That was the start of me bouncing around in lots of jobs trying to find my place again.

Eventually I started a cleaning business with my wife. We cleaned rentals, where it was just the two of us. I went on sales calls and built our business quickly, but after that I didn't talk to too many people for a while. Then we got into residential cleaning at a point, and I chose to clean bathrooms because nobody comes in and talks to you in a bathroom. I had pretty much fully reverted back to that shy kid I once was.

So that's my cautionary tale. If you don't use it, you lose it. I never wanted to, but learned that lesson. I've really started coming back out of my shell through talking with customers and expanding our business, though it is still just my wife and I. We work around more people now, and I "talk" to a lot of people online. I believe that the written word may in a venue like this may be one of my favorite ways to communicate. Social anxiety sucks, and if you manage to beat it down, go ahead and keep it down. If you let it up off the mat, it may very well come back stronger. Just a word of caution from my own story. I've never quite regained that swagger that I had back in the day when I was leading that organization, though I'm closer than I've ever been now despite a very different life.

I've been in sales since the seventh grade, cold calling since college (25 years ago) and I will be cold calling on Monday morning. Yes, I will be nervous every time someone answers the phone, but especially those first twenty dials.

I think I know the answer. When you are painfully shy, it takes a real effort just to function in a group. that effort can continue after you are used to talking with people...so you get better and better.

People that are naturally outgoing and popular, may never develop their sales skills beyond a basic level. They are simply not used to putting any effort into it. I see that all the time.

Everything about selling was an uphill battle for me. But the benefit of an uphill battle, is that you can keep going up.

If you don't believe in yourself, you won't do the behaviors.

If you don't do the behaviors, you won't get the results.

Nearly every problem in selling is head trash. Sales a conceptual activity, not a technical one.

You have to have both. Like Kanigan says; You have to believe in yourself or you won't make the effort.

But you have to know what you are doing. Motivation alone makes you a motivated moron. You develop skills to make your ambition pay off.

And that's the secret of being shy. You can be a shy person with Ambition.
And ambition will force you to learn.

misterme,

I believe it's your uncanny resemblance to a well-known Hollywood icon.
Drives the women mad and leaves the men green with envy.

You're a rock. Your story brought a tear to my eye. How you overcame your tragic handsomeness, to go on to being successful...is an inspiration to us all.


One thing I see a lot of, is a salesperson who has the social and cultural bias against asking people for money...or "selling". Most normal people find it distasteful to talk about money. I was oblivious to all that. It didn't bother me if they said "No", and I didn't get excited if they said "Yes".

But I watched sooo many salespeople freeze when it came time to close. The part of the brain that finds selling socially unacceptable...is just missing in me.

Good.

For some reason cold calling is something I hate even today...

I have no problem contacting leads and prospects who have responded to an advertisement or direct mail piece though.

But as luck will have it in my ad sales days I use to cold call business owners out of the blue and offer them something free like a free report or booklet to build a relationship with them and use that platform to later sale them some ad space in a directory we use to publish. This tactic helped me break the ice and darn sure helped with the nerves.

Wow! That seems like the key. Your desire to sell must be so strong that it gets rid of your social anxiety. Very powerful stuff!

the problem is, you can fake confidence...but you can't fake competence.

If you spend time really getting good at what you are doing, there is no need to fake it.

Do you have any useful tips for faking it?

Im sure good telemarketers must make more than that a month ?

Believe me I believe you from the deep of my heart.

Did you do anything that helped you with facing your fears like deep breathing, affirmations, deep breathing etc?

That's what everyone should do, but not everyone has the willpower. taking some pill doesn't make your problems magically go away, but the will do change yourself and become a better person does! Plus, the idea that anxiety is losing you money, that's just the icing on the cake, IMO!