5 Meditation Tips to Increase Sales

This ultimate meditation guide for salespeople will specifically focus on how to train your brain to stay focused and productive in sales. This guide will help you achieve this in five steps: take in the good, express gratitude, perform acts of kindness, be a single-tasker, and practice mindful breathing. 

1. Take in the good
2. Express Gratitude
3. Perform Acts of Kindness
4. Stay Focused
5. Practice Mindful Breathing

Living in the information age, we keep developing our technological consciousness to be more and more productive. Most companies are still waiting for the pay off as the era of productivity has given rise to the age of distraction. Three in four employers estimate that at least 2 hours lost daily to distractions, according to the survey.

One of the most effective ways to avoid technologically distractions and focus better is meditation. The research from the Shamatha Project suggests that improving one’s mindfulness reduces the levels of stress hormone, “cortisol”. When cortisol levels drop, the mind calms down and is able to become more focused. No wonder why some of the biggest companies like Google, Apple, General Mills, and HBO are leading the way in promoting on-the-job meditation. It helps employees to feel centered, relaxed and confident.

Why Salespeople Should Meditate?

Whether you’re pursuing new leads, or convincing your boss to invest in a tool to map out all your stops on a given day, you have to focus a lot of attention outward.

Practicing mindfulness will help you to be more focused on the positive experiences by changing how your brain processes information and manages the effects of distraction. It can help you communicate your ideas better and practice beautiful sales pitches. Let’s start with understanding our minds’ mechanism and our role at optimizing this supercomputer.

Negativity bias

Have you ever had difficulty remembering your customer’s name but his/her angry face? If yes, this is, in a nutshell, great example for negativity bias. It’s a tendency to pay more attention to negative experiences than to positive ones.

Negative stimuli produce more neural activity than do equally intense (e.g., loud, bright) positive ones. They are also perceived more easily and quickly. For example, people in studies can identify angry faces faster than happy ones; even if they are shown these images so quickly that they cannot have any conscious recognition of them.

Positive thought have a habit of not sticking. Dr. Rick Hanson explains it this way: “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”

Practicing meditation helps you reduce the negativity bias. Let’s start with our first step:

Take in the Good

Fight your brain’s negativity bias by appreciating and lingering on the tiny, positive moments you experience day-to-day.

Take a few minutes a day to visualize how you can talk, listen, and behave in your next sales meeting to achieve your goals. Try to remember positive facts about your customers, and let the negativity go away. This experience is the key to a good relationship with your customers.

Express Gratitude

Expressing gratitude builds neural pathways that help you see the good in life. A positive attitude makes it easier to handle stressful situations.

First; keep envisioning new ways to say thank you. Go old school and handwrite a note to thank your customers. Not just “thank you”, but thank you for something specific and why you truly appreciate it.

Second; ask your customers often what they would love to see in your product and build a feedback list for each customer (without breaking the eye contact).

Make your customers a higher priority. The more you know about serving them, the faster you’ll grow. The key is; know what works best connecting you to your customers. You might be better at establishing trust with the buyer than other salespeople.   

Perform Acts of Kindness

Doing something for someone else feels good. That feeling will stay with you throughout the day and improve your productivity.

Find opportunities to compliment your customers and prospects. This is a positive trigger that helps improve your relationship with the client. Here are some examples of positive statements:

“Mr. Smith, thank you for using our product for more than a year. We value the fact that you choose to do business with us and want to extend your membership with no charge.”

Acts of kindness are best received when they are not expected. From a customer experience perspective, random acts of kindness should not be the defining element of the overall experience. Instead, they should fit seamlessly with the character of a brand.

Stay Focused

Sales reps are masters of multitasking. You might have seen your fellow sales reps (or yourself), who can juggle emailing, make phone calls and drive sales at the same time. Multitasking might emotionally feel more satisfying, but it can actually result in increased error rates, lower performance, and higher distraction rates.

Slowing down to focus on the present and completing one task at a time is the key to your sales success story. Try listening to brain.fm: music to help you focus by helping your brain waves. Scientifically this kind of music will avoid distractions and will make you focus more. Staying focused will help you knock out some major sales projects!

If you want to improve concentration, read some more tips here that can help you focus on the most important things in your life.

Practice Mindful Breathing

Credit: Andrew Rae

The benefits of controlled breathing has been shown to reduce stress and increase alertness.When you take slow, steady breaths, your brain receives the message that all is well explains Dr. Brown.

Meditate for one minute before every important sales meeting. Close your eyes and take a deep breath, expanding your belly. Pause. Exhale slowly to the count of five. Repeat four times.

Dr. Patricia Farrell suggests we breathe in through the nose, hold for a count of five while the muscles tense, then exhale through the mouth on release. Congratulations. You’ve just calmed your nervous system.

Practice breathing at home, at a desk, or even on the road. This will help you feel grounded, relaxed, and confident. After meditation, you will feel like you can handle anything in sales world.

Final Thoughts

If you want to become more productive and work with your team as one moving body, then start building a happy brain first. Keep a list of positive things happening in your life. Focus on pleasant, positive images to replace any negative thoughts.

Keep expressing gratitude and kindness; you will communicate your ideas better and get more creative in your relationships.