Halloween is my favorite holiday, so it seems like a good time to talk about things that keep coming back to haunt your inside sales team.
I’m not talking about the ghosting prospect who disappeared after telling your salesperson the deal was a sure thing.
I’m thinking about the leadership stuff.
- The priorities that keep multiplying until everything is a priority.
- The new direction that arrives without anyone explaining why the old one changed.
- The initiative that disappears before your salespeople have had enough time to practice, improve, and actually see whether it works.
Those things have a way of coming back! Sometimes, leadership is the one creating the ghosts.
If Everything is a Priority, NOTHING is!
Inside sales leaders rarely have the luxury of one thing that matters. You have revenue and margin goals, activity expectations, pipeline, coaching, customer needs, company initiatives, and whatever monster landed on your desk this week.
The problem starts when all of those things are presented to your team as equally important.
Your salespeople still have to decide what gets their attention first. If you haven’t made that choice clear, they’ll make it for themselves. And their choices may not match yours.
Choosing a priority doesn’t mean the other things stop mattering. It means you’ve decided what deserves more attention right now.
Of course, sometimes priorities need to change.
Something happens in the business. A customer situation changes. The market shifts. A new opportunity appears. You learn something that changes what you thought you knew.
Your team can handle a detour.
What becomes confusing is when you don’t tell them it’s a detour.
Without context, your salespeople don’t know whether the new thing is temporarily important, has been added to their existing priorities, or has replaced what you previously told them mattered.
Tell them what changed. Explain why. Then be equally clear about what the change means for everything they were already working on.
Your Team Learns From Changing Priorities
If priorities continually change without explanation, your team eventually learns something you probably never intended to teach them:
Wait it out.
Why put significant energy into changing how you work when there’s a good chance something else will replace it next month?
Even when you explain the change, constantly moving on to something new creates another problem. Your salespeople need time to practice new behaviors, get better at them, use them consistently, and see whether they’re producing results.
If you move on too quickly, you may decide something didn’t work when the reality is you didn’t give it enough time to work.
Choose Something Worth Staying With
That’s one of the reasons I ask inside sales leaders to choose a 12-Month Area of Focus.
You’re not choosing the only thing you’ll care about for the next twelve months. You’re identifying something important enough to receive sustained leadership attention while all the normal work of running the team continues.
There will be detours. Priorities inside the business will change. Something unexpected will demand attention.
Your Area of Focus gives you something to come back to.
It gives you time to coach, practice, inspect, adjust, and see whether the changes you’re making are actually creating the results you wanted.
Before you introduce the next priority, take a look at what keeps coming back to haunt your team.
Maybe it doesn’t need another quick fix. Maybe it needs you to choose it, give it time to work, and stay focused long enough to see results.
That’s how you kick those spirits out.