The Best Sales Mindset Is A Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is the best sales mindset because sales is all about constantly improving.

“Of the over 4,000 colleges in this country, less than 100 have sales programs or even sales courses.” — Harvard Business Review

There was never a salesperson in history who started their career with all the skills they needed to be successful.

Why?

Because you can’t teach this stuff in school.

The only way to get good at sales is by selling.

And in order to absorb the learnings that can only be gained from selling experience, you need to have a growth mindset.

What does it mean to have a growth mindset?

In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dr. Carol Dweck writes about the differences between two mindsets:

Fixed mindset: belief that your qualities are “carved in stone.”
Growth mindset: “belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.”

Click here to read a summary of the book.

A growth mindset is especially important in sales.

“I always like to kid new members of my team that working in sales changes the neural pathways in your brain — but that’s not actually a joke. A lot of the behaviors required for sales success are a massive departure from the ones you’ve probably valued in your career to date (and, you know, those generally accepted by society).” — Peter Kazanjy

Many behaviors of a successful salesperson are counter-intuitive, compared to what most people experience in their everyday lives:

Talking to complete strangers and asking them for money.
Facing rejection all day, every day, for the whole year, and years to come.
Maintaining relationships with hundreds, maybe thousands, of prospects.

So, if you start your career in sales without the necessary skills to be successful, and you have a fixed mindset, i.e., you believe you can’t learn or get any better—this is a recipe for failure.

Again, nobody starts out in sales with all the skills they need to be successful.

Sales is about learning and getting better with every call/meeting/pitch/demo.

With a growth mindset, you believe that you can improve your sales skills through your own consistent hard work, learning from your mistakes, and getting feedback from your manager and mentors.

Mindset has a direct impact on your success in sales.

In most things, your mindset has an indirect impact on your success—you have a mental attitude, which causes you to think or act a certain way, and then those thoughts or actions have an impact on your success.

In sales, on the other hand, your mindset has a direct impact on your success—the very mental attitude itself will cause you to win or lose deals.

For example, if you’re having a bad day and you start a meeting with a depressed tone and a rude demeanor, your prospect isn’t going to want to do business with you.

Or, if a prospect gives you an objection, and you’re in the habit of giving up when faced with rejection, then you won’t have the resilient, problem-solving mindset required to handle that objection and win the sale.

You might be thinking to yourself … Well, that’s not too bad. I can be happy and solve problems.

That might be true … for one phone call. Or maybe your first 10 or 20 phone calls.

But what if you’ve been on the phone all day?

You’re tired, you’re grouchy, and you’ve been hung up on the last five calls in a row. Would you be able to maintain a positive mental attitude even then?

Four pillars of a successful growth mindset in sales.

In the Mindset section of our Sales Bootcamp, we’ll be discussing the four pillars of a successful growth mindset in sales:

1. Work Ethic

The first non-negotiable for a salesperson is hard work. Sales isn’t easy. If you don’t have the energy to make a hundred phone calls in a day or the courage to face plenty of rejection, you’ll have trouble even getting started in sales.

2. Feedback Implementation

Hard work will get you started, but it won’t guarantee your growth and improvement. To get better at sales, you need to master feedback implementation. This is the process of seeking advice on ways that you can improve, documenting this information, implementing it, testing the results, and then repeating the process over and over.

3. Positive Attitude

Once you’ve mastered hard work and feedback implementation, you’ll likely be on the verge of experiencing burnout, or at least some level of emotional drain. After you’ve been hung up on and maybe even yelled at by prospects who don’t appreciate your cold calls, it can be difficult to maintain a positive attitude. Still, a true sales professional doesn’t take anything personally and lets negativity roll off their back.

4. Desireless Action

Lastly, even though this concept isn’t widely popular in the Western business world, it was immensely helpful for my own personal sales journey. In Eastern thought, it’s referred to as desireless action and can be summed up in this passage from the Bhagavad Gita:

“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.”

It basically means: you can always control how much work you put in, but you can’t always control the outcome. This is a perfect mindset for navigating the ups and downs of sales, because it allows you to stop worrying about deals that don’t close, so that you can focus your energies on productive work, like calling more prospects.

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