4: Overcoming Social Self-Consciousness
An obstacle many people have in selling to the affluent, or interacting with them at all, arises from the aura and mystique that comes from misconceptions about wealth and the people who have it: affluent people are different, better, than "the rest of us," and the assets at their disposal is a source of a power we don't quite understand. As such, we feel intimidated and uncomfortable in their presence.
Given that we live in a culture where affluence is a significant goal, and that people who are not affluent are reluctant to admit as much, few salesmen will confess to being self-conscious when dealing with affluent customers - but many are. This can be seen in the way they attempt to play up to affluence - they go into debt to purchase expensive props to pose as affluent, and they way they behave around affluent people is markedly different than their normal behavior.
It's also noted that this comes into play in other relationships. The example is provided of a salesman who was married to a doctor, who made more money than himself. In a candid conversation, he admitted that the conversation didn't work out because he was never at ease interacting with his wife, her family, and others of her class. His second marriage, to a woman more his equal, was far more comfortable and happy.
He refers to other research into "sales call reluctance," which documents a widespread sense of unease among sales professionals who service affluent clients. Many salesmen admit to being uncomfortable and intimidated by such clients, and behavioral observation remarks significant signs of discomfort and self-consciousness.
The customers noticed this as well, and remarked it as being a sign of the other person's lacking self-esteem or not being happy or competent at their job. This degrades not only the salesman's effectiveness, but the customer's perception of the firm that the salesman represents.
The author reports that this is not just a problem for rookies, but is evident among seasoned veterans. In researching and speaking about the topic, he has met numerous people with many years of experience who confess being uncomfortable about dealing with affluent clients. One anecdote is about a salesman who had achieved affluence himself, but felt like an impostor, and was unable to transition many of the people he met to clients - largely driven by the notion that affluent people revile salesmen.
From somewhere, he produces the figure that "without proper intervention, there is an 87% chance that social self-consciousness will plague you throughout your sales career."
What's Really Holding You Back?
Salesmen, more so than any other group of professionals, spend a considerable amount of money on training and self-improvement materials to help them overcome what they assume to be character flaws: low self-esteem, lack of assertiveness, lack of goal motivation, communication skills, and the like. Much of this is the result of a misdiagnosis. What is really holding them back is social self-consciousness.
Consider the following symptoms:
- Setting sales goals but failing to follow through
- Having feelings of doubt about tour own self-worth
- Overcompensation by "posing" as being wealthier than you are
- Purposefully choosing not to sell to the affluent market segment
- Feeling awkward and tongue-tied when dealing with customers
- Trying to intimidate others to compensate your own lack of self-esteem
Each of these behaviors seems to point to a different problem, buyt all are symptoms of social self-consciousness.
Evaluating Social Self-Consciousness
The author stresses the importance about being completely honest with yourself on the issue of self-consciousness. Nobody like to confess their weaknesses, some go to great lengths to deny it even to themselves, but until your recognize and admit to having a weakness, there's little chance you can do anything to address it.
That said, the author provides a quiz in which the reader answers a number of questions, tallies the ones they answered "yes," and rates their self-consciousness on a scale. (EN: It's a blunt tool, and the implications of each question are obvious, so I'm not replicating it in my reading notes).
Worse still is the tendency to rationalize and plan around weaknesses: a person who feels awkward around affluent people and wants to avoid them may convince themselves, by digging up whatever research they can scavenge, that there is greater profit potential in other market segments. This may or may not be true - the point is that they have put their fear and self-doubt first and used their rational faculty to justify an emotional decision.
Breaking Out and Moving Ahead
Once you determine and accept that social self-consciousness is hindering your performance, your next step is to determine actions that you can take to overcome it. Some suggestions:
- Preparation - Determine what actions you can take that will be appealing to affluent customers
- Rehearsal - Think through a face-to-face encounter and consider what you might say or how you might react to what someone else says
- Action - Just do it. Seek out a few affluent customers and prospects to deal with, and initiate contact. Your goal is not necessarily to succeed, but merely to gain experience.
- Meditation - The author mentions a pseudo-psychological approach to breathing control and focusing on a calming mental image to deal with anxiety
- Affirmation - another pseudo-psych technique of making positive statements to yourself
The key to these techniques is that they cause you to be aware of the problem, rather than having it catch you unprepared, and gives you a positive way of dealing with it rather than having a knee-jerk reaction.
There's also a note that knee-jerk reactions are often counterproductive. Our natural reaction to stress is fight-or-flight, to become inappropriately aggressive or to seek to escape the encounter.
Your Conscious Thought Management Action Plan
The author suggests putting together a plan of action for dealing with social self-consciousness that reiterates some of the points above.
(EN: From here, it goes completely off the rails with some deeply idiotic advice for doing so - and literally includes chanting affirmations, making an inspirational mix-tape, "recharge your energy forces," and other things that would be more at home in a book about spirituality rather than business. Doubtless, there are attitudinal and behavior modification techniques that can be helpful, but not this drums-and-crystals nonsense.)