January 2024, Vol 2
Time Investment: 3-5 Minutes
THE BOTTOM LINE
No one else is developing 'Inner Resolve' within their sales team—you should.
What are the chances that 2024 will be smooth sailing for your sales organization? Perhaps it will be, but the odds are it will take focus and resilience to bear up and perform consistently in the face of unique and sometimes difficult circumstances. Certainly you are going steer through the challenges, but what about your people?
Interestingly, most sales leaders don’t direct their development dollars toward building resilience in their salespeople and managers. Most simply hope their teams will find ways to press on. Why? Because resilience isn’t part of most typical sales training programs—there just isn’t a blueprint for it.
The Diligence Fix captures resilience within the dimension of Inner Resolve. We define it as: Remaining emotionally composed and projecting strength in the face of conflict and setbacks, leveraging internal optimism and a balanced view of circumstances to logically navigate stress, pressure, demands, or challenges.
Sales organizations steeped in diligence have a strong current of Inner Resolve underwriting their success. What would it look like for your business if people recognized their own external and internal triggers and had the emotional toolbox to rationalize their stressors, confront challenges and come out on top?
Free Download: Inner Resolve Development Blueprint
In this month’s resource, we’ve created a game plan for you and your team to begin developing Inner Resolve as a sales force capability. Consider the potential impact of leading a group of highly resilient people and how that would support revenue growth. Download here
Develop Yourself As a Sales Leader
Intro: If you want others to be resilient in the face of stress, then model what Inner Resolve looks like at your level.
Actionable Idea: Your goal shouldn’t be to downplay stress or appear impervious to it. Instead show others that stress impacts you too, but that you have cultivated healthy ways to deal with it.
Ask: What internal or external circumstances get to me? Analyze what spurs emotion and creates a reactive pattern (such as sidelining the sales process or allowing bad seller behavior). Choose one alternative way to deal with the trigger without relaxing leadership expectations. Share your resilience journey with your managers.
A Little Piece of My Mind...
It feels good to turn the page on a New Year. While it’s technically just another day, the new start motivates people to make resolutions. Eat healthy. Be present. Save more. Prioritize nature. These promises are easy to make, but hard to keep. My track record with resolutions is about 3 weeks until the luster begins to fade—what about you?
The truth is, I am probably too ambitious with change and don’t always take the steps to unlearn comfortable behaviors that undermine forward progress. The same is true with our sales organizations. You know there are nagging issues in play that undermine productivity and short-change growth efforts—is this the year you resolve to address them? I hope so!
Inner Resolve gives your personal and professional resolutions their staying power. One of the ways that I practice Inner Resolve is to remind myself that progress isn’t linear, it’s more of a zig-zag that continues advancing. Mindset is everything when you find yourself doing the pick-and-shovel work required to build a growth-ready sales organization. I’m rooting for you!
PS: If you ever want to chat, send me a note at: [email protected]