How To Expand Your Identity And Experience Increased Results
How far and fast we climb also depends on how we see ourselves and the labels we put on ourselves. Our sales identity!
A study was done in 2009 on a sample of 60 salespeople from a Fortune 100 high technology firm responsible for managing multi-million dollar customer projects and it was based on the role identities the salespeople had and their performance in those roles.
This research on sales identity remains one of the clearest links between self-perception and performance.
What the Sales Identity Research Found
Titled ‘Role identity and attributions of high-performing salespeople’, and published in the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 24 Iss: 7, pp.463–473, its findings indicated:
- The high achieving salespeople consider themselves to be sales consultants and trusted advisors, whereas
- The lower performers tend to see themselves as technical specialists.
- The high achievers who saw themselves as consultants and advisors linked their success to relational factors where as
- The technical salespeople attributed their success to the technical knowhow.
As demonstrated above and mentioned by Robert Cialdini in his book ‘Influence’, the law of consistency states that ‘the strongest force in the human personality is the need to remain consistent with how we define ourselves’. It doesn’t matter what mask we put on to the outside world, it will never be our true sales identity until we believe it.
Until we embody it so that it becomes a natural part of us on all levels and we don’t have to work at it anymore.
You can say you are the best salesperson in the world but if you don’t believe that deep down, then you will never reach that level. The secret then is to change your beliefs and start a new story. Sounds easy and with the right strategy, is!
Logic
As we know we cannot logic someone to change their beliefs and behaviours. The smoker who knows it will kill them will still continue smoking no matter how many crippling statistics you give. As a salesperson you logically know the behaviours you have that must change, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen. You know that telephone is only a combinations of metal and plastic and by picking it up and dialing, the world is not going to come to an end but you still resist making those sales calls.
Leverage
There comes a time where something happens that causes you to not just want to change something, whether it be a behaviour or a belief, at a surface level but you emotionally buy in to wanting to change things at a deeper level and that choice becomes a non negotiable.
Until you reach this point though, nothing will change. Like the smoker who decides that losing his life is not enough to give up, but picturing someone else walking his daughter down the aisle without them there, becomes their leverage. Our buyers may want to change on the surface and they may like the idea of what we are offering them, but won’t buy unless they see something that means something to them at a deeper level – until we create leverage – and that depends on our ability to understand, be present to the conversation and question deeply.
Live It
Once you’ve personally got to that point and created leverage, when you’re fully associated to the gain or the loss (your perception) and what that means in your life, when you are ready to adapt, shift or make changes, then you begin to live it – it becomes a part of your sales identity.
The smoker is now wanting to smell nice, not have to hide and stand outside in the rain. They become a non-smoker. The salesperson who is focused on genuine connection first with their buyer and is more interested in ways to grow their buyers business instead of focusing only on getting a signed contract for themselves, will actually end up getting the signature in many cases.
It’s about building an identity that will cause you to believe and behave in ways that will produce the results you want long term. That includes expanding your identity, owning your power and becoming the value you want your clients to experience.
If you’re ready to build a sales identity that holds up under pressure, Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations show sales teams how to close the gap between what they know and how they see themselves.
This is why sales identity work outlasts any single training session. A new script or a new objection-handling technique can lift a number for a quarter, but a salesperson who has genuinely shifted their sales identity carries that change into every call, every negotiation and every renewal conversation that follows. Sales managers who want lasting gains in their team’s performance would do well to coach identity, not just activity – because the behaviours people repeat are the ones that match who they already believe themselves to be.
Think about the salespeople you most admire. Chances are their sales identity shows up before they say a word – in how they listen, how they handle a tough question, how comfortable they are naming the elephant in the room. That sales identity was not handed to them; it was built, one uncomfortable conversation and one honest self-assessment at a time. The good news is the same process is available to anyone willing to start.
Three Ways to Start Expanding Your Sales Identity
You do not need a personality transplant to shift your sales identity – you need a handful of deliberate habits, repeated until they stop feeling deliberate.
- Name the story you are telling yourself. Before you can change a sales identity, you have to notice the quiet self-talk running underneath it – “I am not pushy enough,” “I am just the technical person,” “closing feels sleazy.” Write it down. You cannot edit a script you have not read.
- Borrow the identity before you feel it. Act, for one call, the way a trusted advisor would act – curious, unhurried, willing to say the hard thing. Confidence in a new sales identity tends to follow the behaviour, not the other way round.
- Track evidence, not just outcomes. Every time you handle a tough question well or ask the question everyone else avoids, log it. A sales identity is rebuilt on a stack of small proofs, not one big breakthrough.
None of this happens in a single session. But salespeople who treat their sales identity as something they can deliberately shape – rather than a fixed trait they were born with – are the ones who keep growing long after the initial motivation fades.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
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