Your vision shouldn’t be something you create, admire, and then forget about. It should change what you notice day to day.
Once you know where you’re trying to go, you begin seeing what’s happening differently. You hear something in a 1:1 and realize you need to work on that. You look at the numbers and see something you might have skimmed past before. You notice a salesperson doing something you want everyone on the team to learn.
You may even recognize that something you’ve been tolerating doesn’t fit where you’re trying to go.
Vision Gives Your Attention Direction
Inside sales leaders have more information coming at them than they could possibly act on. Sales results, activity numbers, pipeline movement, customer feedback, conversations with salespeople, changes inside the company, and changes in the market are all competing for your attention.
You can’t and shouldn’t give everything equal attention. Your vision helps you decide what deserves more of it.
When you have a clear picture of the team you’re trying to build, you have something to compare today’s reality against. You begin to recognize which behaviors are helping you get there, which systems are supporting the team, and which things are pulling you in a different direction.
That comparison is where vision becomes useful.
What Are You Noticing?
Think about the vision you have for your inside sales team, then look at what’s happening right now.
What are you seeing that tells you you’re moving toward it? Where are people behaving in ways that match the team you’re trying to create? What are you seeing that tells you there is still work to do?
Look at yourself too. What are you doing as the leader that supports your vision? What are you doing that contradicts it?
You don’t have to turn every observation into an action item. Sometimes noticing something is enough to make you curious. Curiosity gives you a reason to look a little closer, ask another question, or gather more information before deciding what to do.
Your Vision Can Change Too
There’s another reason to keep paying attention. What you notice may change your vision.
You learn more about your salespeople and discover what works. You find out something you were certain about wasn’t quite right. Your business changes, your customers change, and you change.
That’s why I don’t think of vision as something you create once and frame on the wall. It’s a picture of where you’re trying to go based on the best of what you know today.
As you learn more, that picture may become clearer. It may become more ambitious. Parts of it may become less important, while something you hadn’t considered before becomes essential.
Changing your vision because you’ve learned something doesn’t mean the original vision was wrong. It means you’re paying attention.
Keep looking, learning, and noticing. Allow what you learn to make the picture of where you’re going clearer.
Because your vision should change what you notice.
And sometimes, what you notice should change your vision.
Keep looking,
Lynn