INTRODUCTION

Why Your Comfort Zone Is Your Power Zone

ONE OF MY CLIENTS RECENTLY SAID her previous coach told her she “had to get out of her own way to be able to make a sale.” We have all heard this advice as well and done our best to “get out of our comfort zone” to try to be successful doing something others have told us we “should” do. This book destroys this long-held myth.

For decades now, sales trainers have all been teaching methods of getting sales that primarily rely on being pushy and learning scripts on how to overcome objections. This approach has been used for decades to teach how to “control” a conversation.

For many people, this idea of controlling a conversation means “controlling another person,” which produces feelings of anxiety, which then decreases the likelihood of a successful sale. This same approach has been described over and over by salespeople—and potential customers—as her inauthentic, pushy, and spammy.”

In her article “Buyers Speak Out: How Sales Needs to Evolve,” Mimi An recaps the results of HubSpot’s 2021 Sales Enablement Report: “In an unaided, open text question asking respondents to describe sales, HubSpot Research found there is still a strong association with salespeople being overly pushy and aggressive.”¹

Being pushy is also one of the greatest fears of those in the sales industry because it requires them to

• Go against their natural way of building relationships

• Be out of alignment with what they have been taught about treating people the way they want to be treated

• Learn skills to help them be successful in risky and uncomfortable situations

Hundreds of articles have been written and countless studies have been conducted by psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, and researchers that prove that taking stress-producing risks creates more anxiety.

These training techniques force salespeople to go outside their comfort zone. In doing so, they tend to feel they have to bend themselves out of shape, which causes them to be out of alignment with their core values.

Strong feelings of worry negatively affect self-esteem, which leads to a lack of confidence and a lack of sales. The fear of being pushy is also the reason for frequent turnover in the sales industry. No one enjoys feeling defeated and rejected over and over. That is why so many people quit after being trained in these spammy sales tactics.

Of course, we can remember a time we found a way to actually do what looked like getting out of our comfort zone. If we were lucky, we found we enjoyed it. But, we reached that point only because we simply found a way to expand our comfort zone, not leave it entirely.

As an example, I did something that looked like I was stepping beyond my comfort zone when I went snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. I am not a good swimmer, and I was incredibly uncomfortable and nervous—I had not done anything like that before. And yet I was not going to pass up the opportunity to see the coral and sea life up close.

In actuality, I did not go beyond my comfort zone. I simply expanded it a little bit by doing something I really wanted to do yet had not done before. I took a quick snorkeling lesson, and I stayed in close proximity to the tour guide to feel safer. I accomplished my goal of checking off an item on my bucket list.

You could compare the expansion of my comfort zone to the elastic band in a comfy pair of sweatpants, as my friend Koriani Baptist does. The waistband has some flexibility to give a little more room to grow and move when our waistline expands a bit. Our comfort zone is also like a rubber band. Each one is created with a specific circumference to perform its task. Because it has some flexibility, it has the capacity to expand a bit beyond that circumference and still be fully functional. However, if it gets bent out of shape or is expanded too far—meaning it goes outside its set comfort zone—it snaps, breaks, and is unable to perform the function for which it was created.

What do rubber bands and sweatpants have to do with selling? Everything!

The call is growing louder to end practices that feel pushy to prospects and customers and push salespeople to their breaking point. Our comfort zone’s expandable circumference allows for personal and business growth. To support this fact, the article “Women in the Workplace: Why Women Make Great Leaders and How to Retain Them,” released by the Center for Creative Leadership, refers to research that proves people prefer personally meaningful work that connects to their values, purpose, and work-life balance. According to the article, they want “a specific type of employment that social scientists refer to as ‘a calling.’ Callings are jobs that people feel drawn to pursue; find intrinsically enjoyable and meaningful; and see as a central part of their identity. Research shows that experiencing work as a ‘calling’ is related to increased job satisfaction.”²

For this reason, you will find within this book a new and simple sales training—a process for gently expanding your comfort zone to stay flexible and resilient throughout the selling process, including in the face of customer objections, by remaining in alignment with your calling.

By attuning with your purpose, you will discover how to be in alignment with yourself, what you are selling, your prospects, and what you are saying to your prospects.

This is what I mean by “selling from your comfort zone,” which I call “Alignment Marketing.” This book will guide you through the Alignment Marketing Formula:

Alignment + Belief × Consistency = Sales, Satisfaction, and Success

This paradigm-shifting approach steers salespeople away from using pushy and spammy sales tactics, which are outside of your natural comfort zone. It instead teaches you how to bring meaning to your role as a salesperson by solving problems as the first step in building relationships with your prospects.

Using this formula, you will build confidence and find the positive energy needed to achieve your goals. The more motivated you are, the more likely you are to stay in action, allowing you to grow gently and stretch comfortably daily to achieve larger and larger goals without reaching your breaking point.

By working within and expanding your comfort zone—by being in alignment with your core values and personality traits—you will have more confidence, more energy, and more courage to achieve your goals, which greatly increases the likelihood of making sales, experiencing satisfaction, and achieving success.

I love the reaction Sam Horn, CEO of the Intrigue Agency, had when I told her about the Alignment Marketing Formula. She said, “It’s how to shift from incongruent to the congruent, from what feels wrong to what feels right, what is uncomfortable to what is comfortable, what we do our best to avoid to what we welcome and approach, and from making sales poorly to making sales well.”

To support you in staying in action, each chapter explains how to stay in alignment with yourself, your company, and your ideal audience or prospects.

You will create your personal alignment strategy following these steps:

1. Identify your unique strengths and your purpose (or calling) for representing the products and services you choose to sell.

2. Craft your personal brand that both aligns with your company’s mission and yet identifies who you are, what problems you can uniquely solve, and who you want to serve (your ideal audience). This defines the circumference of your circle of alignment.

3. Develop your certainty and confidence of your ideal audience and the problems (also called pain points) they want someone to solve.

4. Locate and connect with the people who match your ideal audience profile—whether in person or online. With this new Alignment Marketing Formula, you will never again spam your friends and family. Even better, you will learn how to start conversations with people who have been waiting to meet you.

5. Spark emotionally compelling engagement with your ideal prospects—whether in person or online.

6. Transition the connection with your ideal prospects through the Know, Like, and Trust stages all the way to the sale and beyond to a long-term profitable relationship that continues to be mutually satisfying to you and your customers or clients.

7. Practice a daily routine of alignment to gently expand the circumference of your comfort zone to avoid feeling overwhelmed as you attract and manage an ever-increasing amount of abundance.

Over the many years I have been coaching thousands of sales representatives in using the Alignment Marketing Formula, my clients report the following:

• More sales resulting from stronger and more satisfying relationships with prospects who become their customers faster

• Greater job satisfaction

• Increased self-directed motivation

• Longer commitment to the same company and the company’s mission

I had the pleasure of interviewing five of my clients about their experiences using the Alignment Marketing Formula to grow their businesses and teaching this formula to others too. You will discover quotes from each of them throughout this book to support you in practicing the exercises and tips I suggest. I introduce to you these five clients:

The guidance in the book takes the guesswork out of prioritizing who is the most ideal prospect for your company’s products or services, making it easy for you to know who is likely to say yes and direct your focus on those prospects faster, which leads to sales happening much more quickly and with greater satisfaction.

Your comfort zone is your power zone. Let’s get back into alignment and make more sales!