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5 Ways To Use Subconscious Programming To Increase Sales And Mitigate B2B Sales Burnout

Forbes Business Development Council

Oscar Chavez is an industry leader invested in turning sales & marketing into profit. Founder of Growthly Group & The Boardroom Chairman.

In the hit 2006 documentary The Secret, John Assaraf, former CEO of RE/MAX Indiana describes the methods he used to bring his team's sales performance from $1 billion to $4 billion in one year.

His solution? Subconscious programming. In this article, I will break down five ways leaders can implement this practice as a means of ramping up sales performance and mitigating B2B sales burnout.

B2B sales burnout occurs when sales reps become physically, mentally and emotionally distressed from too much work. The stakes of B2B sales burnout are high, as B2B sales reps typically receive higher commissions because of the size of the deals they close. If they’re not able to meet their workload demands, their income, lifestyle and health can be sorely affected.

The good news is there is a solution to prevent this negative outcome. Eliminate B2B sales burnout and improve revenue enablement with the following five steps for subconscious programming inspired by Assaraf's leadership style.

1. Help your salespeople develop a high-performance self-image.

Sales reps don’t sell what they think they can sell. They sell and close deals based on their expectations for themselves. If they think they’re worthy of a $10 million deal, they can do it. If they think they’re only worthy of a $100,000 deal, then that’s the limit of what they are able to sell.

That’s why the first step to eliminating B2B sales burnout is helping your salespeople develop a high-performance self-image. You must help them create a new identity, reinforced by their own belief in themselves and their skills. Every step after this one will, in turn, reinforce that self-image and influence their behaviors.

2. Help them visualize their success.

First-person visualization is a form of simulation for your brain. It can be an excellent motivator, particularly for your sales reps who are working on a more positive, more confident self-image.

Visualizing ourselves achieving success helps increase mindfulness, mindfulness helps us develop emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence helps us become better negotiators. Better negotiators close more deals at higher premiums.

This is why first-person visualization is effective for driving sales while simultaneously reducing the chances of B2B sales burnout.

3. Help your team develop goals and behaviors that will support their self-image.

Once your salespeople believe in and can visualize their new self-image, the next step is to lay out a plan for achieving small goals that will help them fully realize this identity.

For example, if a sales rep envisions themselves as going from making $500,000 a year to $1,000,000 a year in sales, confidence and visualization alone won’t get them there. They need to break down their journey into small, actionable goals. Otherwise, they will suffer from B2B sales burnout because they’re attempting to make more sales without planning how to realistically accomplish that.

If you’re a sales leader setting targets for your reps, it’s important to make them achievable and not an absurd stretch from what your reps accomplished last year.

4. Help them practice the habits that will reinforce their new self-image.

It’s not enough for your reps to just make goals. You must also take it to another level by helping them practice the habits that will enable them to achieve their new goals without driving them into B2B sales burnout.

Practice makes permanent patterns in the brain. The more you repeat an action, the more it is ingrained in your identity. That’s the point of changing habits.

If a sales rep sets a goal of making an extra $1,250,500 by the end of this quarter to help them meet their larger goal of doubling their annual sales, they must develop new daily habits. These might include such habits as getting to work an hour earlier or placing five extra cold calls every afternoon.

Whatever they are, these new habits will reinforce the team member's new self-image, which will reinforce their goals and so on. The longer they practice, the more natural it will feel, and the less likely their will suffer burnout.

5. Build an environment in which your team's self-image is reinforced.

The human brain is biologically wired for avoiding pain and discomfort, conserving energy and surviving to maintain its own safety. When our environment reinforces our old self-image, our tendency is to fall back into old behaviors, making us vulnerable to B2B sales burnout.

But when we’re in an environment that augments our new self-image, then there is room for growth. When there is room for growth, we start to develop a new set of neural patterns, beliefs and behaviors.

This is why it’s important for you to help your reps build an environment in which they can augment their new sense of self. This will help them snuff out B2B sales burnout before it even begins.

Eliminate B2B sales burnout with a focus on BAHO.

Inspired by Assaraf’s method and many others like him, I’ve learned from CEOs and sales reps alike and found that the remedy for B2B sales burnout is in something I call the BAHO method.

BAHO stands for: beliefs, actions, habits and outcomes. Many gurus speak for hours and write books about habits, but they fail to teach people that habits are born from actions, which are born from beliefs. It's important to have a framework for uncovering your sales reps’ false beliefs and helping them replace them with new, high-performance beliefs. This can help your team achieve their best outcomes.

Many companies opt to host a sales kick-off event to get their salespeople excited about a new year of selling. This can be wonderful for building team culture and reducing B2B sales burnout.

Kick-off events that also incorporate sales training in the form of guided masterminds is my top recommendation, as it uncovers blocks to performance in a group setting and elevates individual and team performance. Consider this for your next team training session to ramp up performance and engagement within your team.


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