In sales seminars I often ask the question: How often do your customers and prospects tell you that your prices are too high?

Typical answers: all the time; daily; just about every time I quote.

It's easy to lose confidence in the competitiveness of the prices you're authorized to quote when customers and prospects continuously and consistently tell you that your prices are not competitive as compared to the prices your competitors are quoting in the marketplace.

When you lose confidence, you become vulnerable. Your gross margin is at risk of deteriorating. Pricing insecurity leads to a general lack of courage.

In my younger days, my wife and I were both avid tennis players. Except for the time we were engaged in church-related activities, we spent the majority of our weekends on the tennis court. So I knew a lot about the game of tennis.

Soon I had enough confidence in my game to begin playing some tournament tennis. Although I have several trophies to prove my ability to occasionally win tennis matches, I would, of course, sometimes would lose. And on some on those occasions I would actually begin the losing process during the warm-up, you know when you and your opponent spend a few minutes before the match hitting forehands, backhands, overhead smashes, serves, etc.

How could you possibly lose during the warm-up, you might ask? After all, you don't even keep score while you're warming up. Well, I'll tell you. And if you've ever played against a really good tennis player, you can hopefully relate to my explanation. I became intimidated by the speed of my opponent's serve. My opponent would serve the ball with such incredible velocity that I made up my mind before the match ever began that he was going to wipe me off the court.

Has something similar ever happened to you? Perhaps it wasn't before a tennis match, maybe it was during a golf tournament. Your opponent birdied the first hole and you had to scramble like crazy just to make a double bogie. Your confidence was shattered. You made up your mind after the first hole that your opponent was a far superior player. You quickly forgot about the birdies you've made over the years. All you were able to concentrate on was HIS birdie and YOUR double bogie.

It's funny how our minds play these kinds of tricks on us. But any competitor knows that most sports-related games are as much mental as they are physical. If our "minds are not right," neither is our game.

The same psychology holds true in selling. Salespeople that allow customers and prospects to "get to them;" that is, get "inside their head" with a whole host of negatives often lose their pricing conviction before they ever get out of the starting blocks.

I read a book once -- I don't remember the author's name -- called the Inner Game of Tennis. The author attempted to teach the reader to mentally prepare for a tennis match and avoid the intimidating tactics of their opponents.

Perhaps there is a book on the "inner game" of selling, but if there is, I've never read it. I do know from experience, however, that a salesperson's willingness to prepare to make a sales call is as important, if not more important, than the willingness to make the call itself.

Bobby Knight, the controversial, but highly successful coach at Indiana, and now Texas Tech, once said, "The will to prepare to win is more important than the will to win." He was talking about practice.

Did you ever play high school football, basketball, baseball, tennis, soccer, etc.? Most of us did.

Did you practice before the big game? Of course you did. If you played a team sport, did you ever watch game films? Of course you did.

You were an amateur, you weren't paid to play, yet you practiced like crazy. Your coach made sure that you practiced hard enough to get prepared for going up against an opponent.

Now you're a professional! The amount of your income is influenced largely by your ability to make a sale at full price without having to resort to discounting. But how much do you practice? How much time do you spend preparing to defend your prices? Even though you know that the probability is quite high that your customers and prospects will question the competitiveness of your prices, I'll bet you rarely, if ever, go through the preparation that is necessary to raise the odds that you will get the order at full price.

Most salespeople merely "wing it." Sure, they work long hours (play hard), but they don't practice. They do little to prepare.

If you want to see your gross margins improve along with your sales, make the decision to allocate some time for preparation for the sales call. Ask your supervisor or a fellow salesperson to play the role of the customer to give you an opportunity to practice. If you can't perform well in practice, odds are you won't perform well when the sales call is for real.

Even if all you do is to pull your vehicle over to the side of the road before arriving at the sales call, spend a few minutes anticipating the kinds of objections you're likely to encounter. Then prepare the kinds of responses you will use to overcome them.

Your willingness to prepare a defense will largely determine how much resolve your demeanor will reflect when you quote your prices. If you sound at all pathetic when you quote your prices, your customers and prospects will instinctively pick up on your insecurity in a heartbeat.

Athletes spend more time practicing than they spend playing. How about you? Are you a practicing sales professional or a salesperson who merely plays hard?