There are six steps in Self reflection in Sales that can have a major impact on performance. They are,

1. Description What happened?
2. Feelings What were your thoughts and feelings?

If you could put yourself in the shoes of your customer, how do you think they thought and felt?

3. What was good and what was bad about the situation?
4. Analysis What sense can you now make of the situation?
5. What else might you have done?
6. Action Plan what will you do next time?

Self reflection takes time and effort, but it is the key to learning from experience. The tricky part is finding the time to invest in self reflection.

Assignment #4 is an exercise in Sales Self Reflection.

Identify the situation you plan to analyze and reflect upon, and then work through each of the following stages. This can involve one of the role plays we have done in class or any situation where you have attempted to sell someone something be it as a sales person or just convincing someone to take a specific course of action.

Stage 1 Description

At the outset, the task is just to gather a detailed description of the situation. This could be a sales role play that we have done in class or any situation where you have attempted to sell something be it as a salesperson or just convincing someone to take a specific course of action.

For now, there is no need to draw any conclusions on what happened.

Here are some prompt questions,

• Where and when did this occur?
• Why were you there?
• Who else was present?
• What happened on his occasion?
• What action did you take?
• What action did other people take?
• What was the outcome?

Consider: Gather enough background information to set the context, but aim to keep things concise and relevant. Try to keep to the point. Extra detail will just obscure things making it more difficult to learn from your experience.

Stage 2 Feelings

Recall the thoughts and feelings that you had during the experience.

The following series of questions can be used to provide structure.

1. How were you feeling before the situation occurred
2. How did you feel while the situation was occurring?
3. How do you think others present were feeling during this situation?
4. How did you feel immediately afterwards?
5. What are your thoughts about the situation right now?
6. How do you believe the other people now feel about the situation?

Consider: Personal feelings invariably influence a situation, and some people will find it difficult to be open and honest about their feelings.

Stage 3 Evaluation

Next, look at what happened with an open mind and consider which approaches worked and which ones seemed ineffective.

Some useful prompts include:

1. Can you identify what was positive about this situation?
2. Can you identify what was negative?
3. What do you believe went well?
4. What do you think went less well?
5. How did you react or contribute to the situation (positively or negatively)?
6. How did the other people react or contribute to the situation (positively or negatively)?

Consider: Try to ask yourself a series of why questions to discover the root cause of the problem.

Stage 4 Analysis

During this stage, try to link what actually happened to past experiences, training and/or existing knowledge of established best practice.

Reflect on what actually happened by asking:

• What choices did you make?
• What effect did those choices have?
• What things did you do that helped the situation?
• What things did you do that hindered the situation?
• How was this situation like your previous experiences?
• How was this situation different from your previous experiences?

Advice: This stage is an opportunity to make links between theory and practice by really reflecting on what happened and, therefore, converting learning and knowledge into action. Reflection like this identifies what you know as well as what you dont know.

Stage 5 Conclusions

Once the analysis is complete, you can begin to draw some conclusions about what took place. This process involves reviewing the event in light of all the information that you have gathered.

This could involve questions such as:

• What might have made this a more positive experience for all those involved?
• What would you do differently if you found yourself facing the same situation in the future?
• So you handle this kind of situation better next time, what specific skill will you need to acquire or develop?

Advice: Its very unlikely this will be a wholly negative experience. So, in addition to identifying what you may need to change, its equally important to give credit for positive actions and reinforce behaviours and strategies that can be repeated to ensure future positive outcomes.

Stage 6 Action Plan

By now you should be able to identify some positive strategies you could employ to deal with similar events more effectively when they arise in the future. So use this final stage to develop an action plan that addresses how you can make these changes.

Any plan should be able to answer the following questions: If a similar situation arose again, what would you do?