How Do You See Yourself?
Some years ago I worked for a car rental company located at the airport in Gypsum, Colorado. It was a fun job. I would sometimes go to the arrivals area and lead customers to our office where I would help them complete their rental contracts. Sometimes I would drive up to the plane and receive the high profile customers who didn’t want to spend much time at the office doing paperwork.
One of the things we (the rental team) did was upgrade customers to bigger cars and sell auto coverage in addition to the rental. In my first few days I would tell the customer about the upgrade and the insurance but I never went ahead and asked them to make the buying decision.
It was then that my manager pulled me aside and helped me diagnose why my sales were lagging. He had observed me make a couple of presentations and he suggested that I possibly had a ‘mental block’ that was limiting me from achieving better results with my customers. My manager then gave me a training DVD and asked me to watch it in the company break room. The main thing that stood out from the DVD for me that day was the power of self-image. The speaker pointed out that self-image was the number one obstacle to achieving higher productivity in any human endeavor.
As I thought about it I realized that self-image was the main thing I was dealing with. I had grown up in a family that was not business oriented and I never quite saw myself as a successful seller. I had to break through this barrier before I started seeing better results from my presentations.
