Insights··4 min
The New ABCs of Sales: Attitude, Belief, Confidence
The old ABC was Always Be Closing. Twenty years in, I use a different one, and it is the only thing in sales you fully control.
Ghassan Nawfal, Director of Sales, GPOS at Geidea UAE · Updated
I once believed that if I could just find that one killer closing statement, that bulletproof closing technique, all my stress and troubles of selling would go away forever. Unfortunately, that statement and that technique do not exist. There are proper techniques that are extremely helpful and effective. A magic bullet is the Holy Grail of sales, and nobody has found it.
Fast forward twenty years and I can honestly say that my success has been driven by what I call the new ABCs of sales, the Gus version: Attitude, Belief and Confidence.
Remove any one of these three and success becomes at the mercy of luck.
The chain
The equation is simple. Our thoughts control our beliefs. Our beliefs affect our expectations. Our expectations shape our attitude. Attitude drives performance, performance feeds back into belief, and belief is what confidence is made of. It is a loop, and it runs in both directions.
Think of it this way. You have a great meeting lined up with a potential client. Your thought is: I am going to close a new client today, because I strongly believe I have the right solution for his problem. What is your belief? You are getting a new client. What is your expectation of how the meeting ends? Great. What will your attitude be? Upbeat. The mojo is working. Your confidence has already assured you a win before you have shaken a hand.
Where people get it wrong
Two mistakes. The first is doing it once. You have to run this loop enough times for it to start working, or it is counterproductive: one bad meeting after one good thought and the whole thing collapses. The second is thinking attitude alone closes deals. A positive attitude is not going to guarantee a sale. It guarantees that you show up able to sell.
What makes the ABCs worth more than any technique is that you have total control over them. Nobody on the client side can take your attitude away. Your pricing committee cannot vote on your belief. That is rare in this job, where almost everything else depends on someone else's calendar.
How do you build confidence in sales?
Confidence is the output, not the input. You do not get it by deciding to have it before a meeting; you get it by running the loop above deliberately for weeks. Prepare the thought, state the belief, expect the outcome, walk in with the attitude, perform, and let the result feed the next belief. The reps I have watched become confident did nothing mystical. They did that, daily, including on the days the loop lost.
For managers
- The ABCs can make or break a team as easily as an individual. Evaluate them regularly, in one-to-ones, not in a survey.
- You can coach technique. You can only create the conditions for attitude. Know which one you are working on in any given conversation.
- Watch belief first. When a rep stops believing the product solves the problem, confidence goes next, and attitude last. By the time attitude shows, you are late.
If you do this consistently and continuously, the likelihood of you succeeding is by far greater than anything else you can do. I would rather hire a rep with the ABCs and no closing lines than the reverse, and I have done both.