Chris Pierce As a leader you want what is best for your sales team. You want them to succeed, to thrive, and to grow. You always want them to learn from their mistakes and you want them to bounce back from adversities. But at the end of the day, you also want them to help you hit certain company numbers, reach their personal development goals, and help you reach yours.
Many leaders attempt to build a mentally tough team only by doing “hard things” together. This is a great start, but many of them miss the mark because they are still hyper focused on the results and not the individuals. Check out what I suggest after years of working with professional teams down below.
What Does Being Mentally Tough Mean?
To refresh your memory on the blogs I’ve shared before, mental toughness is the ability to control yourself, your skillset, and your success even under difficult and stressful circumstances. For a more complete guide to mental toughness, check out our overview blog on it now.
3 Methods to Build a Mentally Tough Sales Team
Building a mentally tough team is not as complex as it may seem. Really it comes down to doing three things:
- Prioritize the well-being of your sales reps
- Focus on factors you can control
- Build a strong sales team culture
#1 Prioritize the well-being of your sales reps
Making the wellbeing of your team your highest priority. Trusting that your results are only the byproduct of your actions and the actions of your team. This means putting your people and their development and growth above the results. This is a very simple idea, but very difficult to execute. It is natural to focus on the results above all else. Instead, focus on things like:
- Reps improvement from month-to-month or over time
- What they did well that month
- Their affect (positive or negative) on the team culture
- Does that rep contribute to a positive work environment?
- Is this rep open to criticism?
The more focus you place on the results, the less attention they are placing on the actions they must take to achieve those results. Place your attention on your people. Make them the highest priority and the results will follow.
#2 Focus on factors you can control
Only praise and criticize controllable factors. Take the time to identify the strategies, skills, effort, attitude, energy and attention that were utilized or not utilized to reach the results. Good or bad. This will help your team to know that you care and that you are keeping an eye on them. It is easy to praise high numbers and criticize low numbers.
“Remember, your results are only the byproduct of your actions.”
It takes a lot more effort to identify the specific actions that led to those numbers. Commit to this and you will see a huge shift in the attitude, work ethic, effort, fulfillment and joy of your team. Not only that, but you will also see the results you are hoping for.
#3 Build a strong sales team culture
Teach your reps to follow your example by shifting from focusing on the numbers to discussing the specific actions they took. When you make this shift, expect the same from them. Call yourself out if you catch yourself talking about the results.
“Building a healthy team culture is crucial to high performance, decision-making, and retention. A strong team culture keeps team members engaged and supported so they can have a positive impact on the business.”
Don’t add additional questions that may label the reps work. Just focus on answering these two questions:
- What should they keep doing? And don’t twist it into what went well? Or what was good? We are steering very clear from labeling. Instead identify, simply what they should do again when given the opportunity. This helps build winning streaks by giving the reps clear actions to take.
- What should they do differently? This question gets at not just what to stop doing, but the specifics of what to do next time. If changes need to be made, answering this question will give them clear guidance.
Answering these two questions on a regular basis will train your team on what they should focus on. It will also help make you a great leader and show that you care about your people.
Start Building your Mentally Tough Team Now
If you commit yourself as a leader to strictly adhering to these three simple principles, you will see an incredible change in your team. Reps will work harder, bounce back faster, get up quicker, be happier and find significantly more meaning and fulfillment.
Building an insanely high functioning, super mentally tough team is completely doable. But you, as a sales leader, must take responsibility to make it happen. It’s all on you. You’ve got this!
Join Me Tomorrow!
Exciting news for all of your mental toughness enthusiasts out there, I’ll be hosting a webinar TOMORROW, Thursday the 11th at 2pm with SalesRabbit that you can attend for free. We’ll be talking all about overcoming the fear of failure as a sales leader and tools to be your best mentally tough self. Trust me, you won’t want to miss it.
