How to build resilient sales teams.
By Pete Mercer
High pressure sales environments are not a new concept. Entire sales training courses have been built off the idea of a top-tier sales rep working against the odds. There are some who can thrive in high-pressure environments, but it’s generally not a sustainable way to operate. Businesses and sales representatives are facing an immense amount of pressure on all sides throughout each day.
Repertoire Magazine recently spoke to Michael Licenblat about what it takes to build a resilient sales team in the high-pressure sales environment that we have today. Licenblat is an expert in sales resilience – for 22 years he’s built pressure-proof teams that are designed to bounce back in tough and competitive markets. His organization, Bounce Back Fast, works to develop sales reps and the businesses that they work for into well-oiled machines built to withstand an enormous amount of pressure from challenging and dynamic environments.
Defining business resilience
It can be easy to look at resilience as simply the act of getting back up after getting knocked down. While that’s an important component to being resilient, Licenblat said “Resilience needs to be a high-performance tool, as opposed to a coping and well-being tool.”
Sales reps and organizations can leverage resilience as a thriving skill that keeps them relevant in a constantly changing marketplace. For Licenblat, this means sales reps need to be able to do more in less time, capture more market share, and recover quickly from any setbacks.
There are plenty of sales-specific strategies for building resilience in a sales environment. The specific nature of the strategy is important here – Licenblat argued that the generalization of “taking three deep breaths and going to a nice place in your mind” isn’t specific enough to help with sales performance. Creating optimism over outcome is far more important to the sales process than creating underperforming optimists. Sales reps need strategies that will help them to develop and build the right skillsets.
Licenblat said, “We need to abandon perfectionism. Whilst it’s great to aspire to always get it right, it is a more noble aspiration to bring out your best. The difference is between effort and outcome. If we aspire to focus more on effort as opposed to getting the perfect outcome, we create greater momentum.”
How businesses can navigate pressure
Business owners and operators are facing more pressures than ever before. In the wake of COVID-19, employees had greater expectations for the organizations they worked for. While in some ways that has created a better environment for both employees and businesses, it has created immense challenges for businesses. “Companies are losing good people – loyalty just isn’t there anymore,” Licenblat said.
Trending phrases like “quiet quitting” have recently exploded due to the Great Resignation following the pandemic, wherein employees left their jobs to look for better, more flexible environments. One of the ways that Licenblat said that companies can navigate the new challenges and pressures of operating a business is in how they develop talent. Licenblat said, “Companies will need to develop their talent in specific areas where it’s going to make the most difference in their ability to make more approaches or conversions in what they are doing.”
One of the other ways that businesses can successfully navigate these pressures is by implementing Emotional Intelligence (EI), which can be as simple as changing your management tactics. Micro-managing your team is never going to get the best performance out of them – if you approach management like a coach, you can equip your team with the tools and skills they need to become self-reliant and bounce back when it gets tough.
“We are now seeing sales managers starting to develop their emotional understanding of what the best way they can support their teams is,” Licenblat said. “It’s not about riding them harder; it’s understanding what can drive engagement from your team. When we turn managers into coaches, we stop telling people what to do and we can draw out a higher level of performance.”
The pressure of sales
Sales has always been a high-pressure environment in one way or another. As the dynamic between the sales rep and the customer has changed, it’s up to the sales reps to shift their approach to meet the customer where they are. This alone can create an immense amount of pressure for the sales teams to conform to the needs of the market.
This creates pressure for better performance from the sales, based on a set of KPIs and measurables that are often outside the control and scope of the sales rep. Licenblat said, “People are squeezed for margins and time. There is a constant need to impress upon the client and have a higher quality of customer service. That push to do more and be more is ever-present and a little more accelerated in the last couple of years.”
Energy and time are a dwindling resource for salespeople. When sales reps start to feel like they are spread too thin and don’t have enough time to manage all their ongoing projects, it starts to affect their performance – sales don’t close as fast as they should, prospects go cold, or even something as simple as administrative tasks slip through the cracks. He said, “One of the greatest pressures is the exposure to pushback, rejection, lack of interest, lack of timing – it’s very difficult for even the most experienced sales reps to not have some impact on their self-esteem and motivation.”
Sidebar:
Qualities of a high performing sales rep
Despite the constant challenges and pressures facing sales reps in today’s market, there’s still plenty of room for high performers to excel. But what does a high performing sales rep look like these days? Based on a study conducted by some cognitive psychologists, Licenblat broke it down to four distinct qualities:
- Motivation – “The people who decided to get up and engage their energy and deliberately get into more of a positive state to be able to feel a sense possibility were more effective at prospecting. They are getting out of their own way.”
- Ability to set goals – “Those that set goals were about how many people they wanted to approach, how many calls they want to make, and how to measure success, they were more effective in their sales outcome that others that didn’t set goals.”
- Time management – “It’s not just about time efficiency, it’s about valuing where your focus goes. Those that valued their time highly and didn’t spend it on low dollar productive activity had a higher dollar productive activity.”
- Confidence – “40% of experienced salespeople experienced some aspect of reluctance and avoidance when going after new business. Sales reps need the confidence to get out of their own way, and those that didn’t allow themselves to dwell on their own negativity were much more effective.”