Inside sales leadership is about making sure your team stays on track.
It’s so easy to hear about something new and exciting and go off following it. Or something pops up in your way and instead of taking a detour around and getting on your way again, you never make it back.
Soonwaldsteig is an 85KM trail in Germany, we were only on a day hike on a very small portion of the trail. Which means we had to be very careful and pay attention!
Know Your Destination – we weren’t actually following the Soonwaldsteig, it just coincided with the one we were on for a little while, meaning if we didn’t pay attention we could have ended up WAY off track!
Sales Tip #1 – make sure you’ve articulated your sales destination clearly to your team.
Look for Waymarks – as you’re hiking there are marks like the one in the picture, for us as long as BOTH were showing we were on the right path…
Sales Tip #2 – identify ways for your team to know they are SUCCESSFULLY progressing toward the destination you’ve defined.
Watch for Directional Marks – there came a point on our hike when the Sonnwaldsteig went one direction and our castle hike went the other way, if we weren’t paying attention we wouldn’t have known we were off track.
Sales Tip #3 – it is as important for your success to identify what OFF TRACK looks like in your organization. To often a short term gain earned from an anomaly (you know the sales I’m talking about – one hit wonders that aren’t repeatable OR were with someone outside your target market) is taken by the team as your new direction.
Distance Matters – there are two ways that I’d like you to think about distance.
First is describing it in a way that make sense to the people making the journey. 1 kilometer is a little over 1/2 a mile (0.621371 to be exact so you don’t go look it up). All the signs we came across were in KM and my brain doesn’t think in that distance – so I did the math each time to come up with something I understood.
Sales Tip #4a – Don’t make your salespeople figure it out, share that you now how far away your sales destination is from where you are now, in a way they’ll understand.
Second it’s important to not only know how far it is to your destination, but also to celebrate how long you’ve already come.
Sales Tip #4b -Let your team KNOW it’s not going to be an easy journey. Celebrate the distance you travel along the way. That will help the team knows they are getting closer to goal achievement AND that you appreciate the effort they are making to get there.
By helping your team stay on track – you’ll make it to your sales destination more quickly and with less stress!