Stage 1 of 7 · Before the conversation
Presence
People buy the person before the product.
Presence is the ten-second reset a rep runs before each customer conversation: one exhale to drop the last interaction, one intention set, and a corrected walk-up. It exists because performance decays across a selling day unless the reset is trained rather than left to willpower.
The move
Ten seconds before the knock: drop the last conversation with one exhale, set one intention, fix the walk. Arrive as a guest, not a survivor.
In the body
Unhurried walk-up. Face reset before the knock, not at it. Warmth in the voice at hello — the first signal anyone can measure.
What this stage moves for the operator
This is the stage that governs variance. A team without a trained reset produces a strong morning and a weak afternoon from the same headcount, and no pipeline report will tell you why.
The research behind it
Sources marked specific publication were checked against the publication itself — empirical studies, reviews, and meta-analyses alike. Where a claim rests on an established body of research rather than one identifiable publication, it says so — we would rather label the difference than dress a literature up as a single citation.
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Pre-performance routines — the free-throw ritual, the pre-serve bounce — are widely used to stabilise execution under pressure. The review literature is candid that the mechanism is not settled: it is still debated what a routine should contain and why it helps.
Specific publication Cotterill, "Pre-performance routines in sport: current understanding and future directions," International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology 3(2), 2010
Field selling is fifty performances a day with no bench. Presence applies the athlete’s reset to the sidewalk.
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Putting a feeling into words reduces the amygdala response to negative stimuli — naming the state is itself a regulation step, not just a description of one.
Specific publication Lieberman, Eisenberger, Crockett, Tom, Pfeifer & Way, "Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli," Psychological Science 18(5), 2007
The carry-over is the whole problem. A slammed door that reaches the next doorstep has cost you two conversations, not one.
How Presence fails, and what to coach
The visible symptom is rarely the thing to fix. Each row names what a manager sees, what is actually causing it, and which dimension the coaching conversation belongs to.
| What you see | What is actually happening | What to coach |
|---|---|---|
| Strong mornings, weak afternoons. | No reset exists, so state accumulates across the day. | Inner Game — train the ten seconds until it runs without willpower. |
| The rep is warm on easy doors and clipped on hard ones. | The reset is happening at the knock instead of before it. | Inner Game — move the reset earlier, into the walk-up. |
