Every inside sales leader has a few initiatives that keep coming back to life.
The prospecting initiative you launched in February. The discovery skills training everyone was excited about in April. The CRM discipline you insisted would make forecasting more accurate back in June.
They all seemed important at the time. You had meetings, explained expectations, and probably spent more than a few hours getting everyone on board.
Then something else became urgent.
Before long, the initiative quietly disappeared. Nobody officially declared it dead. You simply stopped talking about it, coaching it, or inspecting whether anyone was still doing it.
And now, here you are in October, wondering why your salespeople aren’t prospecting consistently, asking better discovery questions, or keeping their pipeline information current.
It’s ALIVE! Again…
One of the challenges of inside sales leadership is that there will ALWAYS be something demanding your attention. Revenue goals, customer problems, organizational changes, and the latest initiative from above don’t conveniently wait until you’ve finished what you started.
But think about what happens when your salespeople experience one new priority after another without seeing the previous ones through.
Eventually, they learn to wait.
Why invest the effort required to change how you sell when there’s a reasonable chance the next initiative will replace this one before you’ve had time to get good at it?
And here’s something else worth considering. When you revisit an initiative that didn’t produce the results you expected, how do you know whether the approach was ineffective or whether your team simply didn’t have enough time, practice, and coaching to make it work?
Those are two very different problems.
As you look at what’s happening with your team, consider the initiatives you’ve introduced over the past year. Which ones were given enough coaching, practice, and consistent attention to actually become part of how your team operates?
And which ones are coming back because you moved on before the work was finished?
Before you bring another initiative to life, make sure you’ve given the last one a fair chance to live.