In today’s market with a challenging economy and in most cases, a slow down in sales, a sales team will take its cue from its leadership on where to spend its time. The easy messaging is to go out and sell, which may simply be a means to communicate a disconnect between corporate wants and customer reality. It inspires very little. In today’s economy when sales and commissions are down—what are you inspiring your employees to do?
Clearly, you can’t stop selling. But there is a difference between telling people to go out and sell, and engaging in dialogue to understand how to sell effectively in a down market. The inspiration, from an employee’s perspective comes from participating in the process—what are you doing to understand the current reality, what questions do you ask, how do you participate, what solutions do you offer that are unique and untested? The process is a means to close the gap between the perceptions that their leadership is unaware or unwilling to understand the current economic climate and the barriers to selling.
The process is also about driving new and inspired behavior. Not everyone knows how to sell in a down economy and some people have never been through it. That said, inspiring people who are driven by recognition, reward and accomplishment is a difficult task right now. Inspiration is a mechanism for changing behavior, for changing thinking, for moving people to try new things by seeing unrealized opportunity rather than obstacles. That may sound lofty, but this is a good time to set new standards for how to sell, where to sell and how to build disruptive solutions (disruptive to your competitors…).
A great moment in my early management career was sitting down with my new team and talking about opportunity. The conversation moved in that direction when we were discussing industry solutions and someone actually said “we have nothing more to sell.” No exaggeration and clearly not what any sales manager wants to hear for soooo many reasons. After my initial shock, I simply asked the question—what would you sell if you could—where do you see the opportunities? Thankfully that opened the floodgates to new ideas and while there was some pushback—”we can’t do that because…”, a simple response of “let me figure out how to remove the obstacles, let’s talk about what business is out there” moved us down the right path. It changed behavior and thinking.
In reality, inspiring your employees is more about your own self-awareness as a leader and the time you take to lead. When the pressure is on or we’re doing more with less, it is easy to lose sight of what motivates a staff or to hope they will motivate themselves. Inspiring employees starts with engaged leadership. As a leader, what are you inspiring your employees to do—their job or to move from good to great in their job? And how you are helping to move them in that direction?
