Optimizing Sales Performance for Strong Results: Part 1

Optimizing Sales Performance Podcast Key Takeaways:

• Why performance is more important today than perhaps ever, how training can shape stronger performance, and how you can unleash a stronger drive to achieve among your people.
• Millennials tend to have a stronger sense of purpose that they want in their job; and if they don’t get it they’re quicker to leave and go elsewhere.
• The lack of belief by managers in their people impacts them negatively and they pick up on it. Therefore they perform to the level that their managers expect of them.
• When you think of your top-performing people, at least 50% of their success is due to the ‘soft stuff’- attitudes and achievement drive. And in many cases it’s upward of 85%.
• People want meaningful work. We can help that by helping people articulate a Purpose Statement. Teams can write collective Purpose Statements together.
• When salespeople shift their view of what they’re doing from selling products to improving the quality of people’s lives their sales performance naturally improves.
• The learning process has to go beyond having good content and facilitators and a “training event” and actually changing behavior through ongoing practice, weekly reinforcement and peer sharing and manager coaching.

Quotes from Mike Esterday:

“Managers often hire two people; they think both will be great. They have the right education and experience. One succeeds and the other one fails miserably. It often comes down to their beliefs- their mental paradigms.”

“Most leaders tend to understand that their individuals and their teams need to perform at a higher level. But the question is do the people see themselves performing at a higher level. And even more interesting is do the managers believe their people can perform at a higher level?..” 

“Most people perform at the level they think they should be performing on. We think that all growth begins with stretching that ‘area of the possible’- and that’s where training and managers coaching can really come in to help people.”  

“Organizations that focus on purpose tend to light that fire (in their people) more.”

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Listen to Part 2 of this podcast.