Boost your sales performance by bolstering your Charisma. Charisma matters, because people trust more on charismatic people and buy from them easier. Let me explain to you why and how?

Why Charisma?

Beyond my professional life as a technical sales engineer, I tried a lot to figure out strategies, tactics, and even gimmicks in order to foster my sales efforts’ output. I studied many and practiced a lot. The reality is that sales skills develop under the auspices of great leadership in a team or a firm. The leader is aware of the skills dimensions. These myriad aspects include persuasion skills, relationship abilities, and knowledge about the products and services. These are all necessary but not enough. To meet the acme of your professional career as a seller, you need to rich your charismatic character.

Does Charisma affect your sales performance? The answer is “Yes”. Particularly if you are a B2B seller and you should convince and wow the customer to buy your value proposal. As a salesperson, you need to communicate with a slew of people as soon as you decide to sell a product or a service to a company. This is not a very easy process because you need to take steps that are being more challenging than they used to be. Some of these steps can be taken simultaneously while the others are prerequisites for the remainings. You may start with a cold call to identify the key people and after that, without any doubt, you need to contact decision makers, gatekeepers, users, and buyers at that firm. This is not as easy as it seems. A plethora of times, you may be denied. Moreover, if you could contact them you need to crow about your products and you need them to believe you. Would they? You will overcome a lot of objections and hindrances. Charisma is a high-quality lubricant that helps you to overcome objections and succeed faster.

According to Wikipedia, charisma is compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others. Charismatic people’s properties are being present at the moment, good leaders, professional listeners, and sanguine about the future and affairs. You can find a myriad of articles and videos about Charisma on Google.

As selling tactics and skills are not enough for success in sales, you cannot meet your goals only by having Charisma. So you need a versatile set of skills. For starting to win a new customer, you need to know methods of entering and charisma helps you to enter with less trouble. You should know who to contact in order to convince them to buy from you. Charisma makes your customers believe your story. You need to keep your customers by offering them after-sales services. Charisma sticks the customers to your company. Charisma is a supplement for your other sales skills.

How to have Charisma?

There are ways you can improve your Charisma as a salesperson:

1- Talk, walk, look, listen with confidence

Don’t say a word unless you are sure about it. Don’t have a gesture unless you show confidence. Confidence matters. Your customer should feel your faith in your eyes. The faith for your products, services, and your story. So if you are not sure about your product or even you see some doubts about what you offer, please do not start your sales journey. Doubt impair your tone. Pay attention to the confident tone concept. Having a confident tone should not catch you out to use absolute words in any sentence. Absolute words like “all of our customers, every person I met, 100 percent sure, etc.” can weaken your negotiation power. But the tone is not the words you use, it is the way you use them. So don’t hurry to contact your customer as soon as possible. Dedicate time and enforce yourself to be confident. Memorize any letter about what you offer. Know your competitors as well and behave as a person who is there to solve a problem.

2- Stop being too agreeable

Agreeable people are so permissive and lenient. This seems kind for a seller which can rejoice in his customers. Some people think that agreeable behavior accrues in the negotiations in which you can grow the cake size. But being too agreeable jeopardizes your long-term success and agreeability is the sworn enemy of Charisma. So, please learn to say “No” even though you would lose an opportunity. Unfortunately, being agreeable is a part of the personality and cannot be changed easily. So if you are an agreeable person inherently, you have a challenge for your charisma. You need to have professional practices to learn saying “No”. Most of the time, they are just happy to manipulate you and finally saying: your solution is expensive. I see that there is a propensity inside many people to mortify other people. You can stop them by saying “No” to what they are asking. When you say “No”, they feel your charisma and they will believe your story better and you will sell more. Another way to improve your situation and stop being agreeable is by improving your self-esteem. When you have improved self-esteem you will never ruin your position by accepting nonreasonable requests.

3- Do not beg to sell a product

If you have a solution for a problem and are confident about what you offer and are not agreeable to be manipulated, you did your job completely. If the customer does not buy, you must not beg. You can find other ways to influence and sway, but you should never say to the customer: “Please buy from me”. This makes you out and perpetuates the situation. Your facial expression, your body language, and your assistants never and never should beg for a sale. A powerful, motivational and charismatic salesperson is not allowed to beg.

4- Do not negotiate if you do not have discretion

Volition and having the right to make decisions is a must to enjoy and succeed in your sales journey. For a sales negotiation, you need to have the ability to make some decisions about price, delivery time, payment terms, and after-sale services. If you are only a messenger from your boss and your company, it is better not to dub yourself a seller. You are only a messenger. If there is a culture in your company to check everything with the bosses, these are your bosses who are sellers, not you. In this situation, you need to change your position or your company. Charismatic people decide and you cannot foster your charisma if you cannot decide.

5- Be Accurate

If you make a computational mistake once a year, it is normal. But, if you are being notorious for being reckless and not accurate, you are ruining your reputation and your personal brand. So take care of it. The art of being accurate is so significant in gaining your charismatic character, especially if you are doing sales. No customer will trust someone who is not enough accurate. One way to be more accurate is to stop any harsh thinking and activity. You need to be calm to be accurate. So, kindly keep calm and let charisma sell your story.

6- Tell authentic stories

Stories and storytelling are being more and more advised to be exploited in sales negotiations. That is a piece of good advice, but remember that you need to say only and only authentic stories. Stories that are not authentic can easily disturb your charismatic tonality, behavior, and image. So take care of the stories. Be present completely at the moment you are telling your story. Remember the former notes I said above when you want to narrate your story. Have a confident tone, d0 not beg in your story, and stay optimistic.

7- Control your self-disclosure

Self-disclosure and spilling your guts may help you to make trust in your customers, but you should control them. If you are saying many things about yourself and your personal affairs, you may decrease your charisma, because you may say things that will culminate in a weak image of you. So take care. There is no need to say what is your attitude about marriage, conceiving a baby, your political opinions, etc. Just say them, if you are 100 percent sure about the good results.

Final Note

All in all, Charismatic people are sure of themselves and their actions. You must be sure of yourself as well. What I write here, are my second-order rules and are not empirically proven. But what I am sure about is that, Charism matters in your sales performance. If you are not OK with my second-order rules, make some tailored for yourself.

Regards.

Mohammad Ghorbaninan (Narenjiman)