Question: Has your Sales Organisation purposefully designed your Sales Organisation’s culture and training materials to promote a positive, resilient and solutions-oriented mindset – and can your sales force be described as overtly and consistently positive, resilient and solutions-oriented?
The Reality
According to our research at ThinkSales Global, only 42% of Sales Organisations purposefully designed their Sales Organisation’s culture and training materials to promote a positive, resilient and solutions-oriented mindset.
In addition, 37.4% of companies rate their confidence as Outstanding that their sales force be described as overtly and consistently positive, resilient and solutions-oriented.
The ‘Positive Mindset’ Problem
Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”
The reality is that you can’t separate mindset from sales results – the two are intrinsically linked. A negative mindset and limiting beliefs will yield sales results that reinforce this outlook.
While it’s impossible for sales managers to fundamentally change the perspectives and beliefs of individuals on their team, what they can do is use a culture of positivity and a ‘can-do’ attitude to create a positive, resilient and solutions-orientated environment.
Just as limiting beliefs will lead to limited sales success, an abundant, positive mindset will be self-fulfilling as well, resulting in improved sales.
Help your team embrace an internal locus of control
Our locus of control is how we perceive the world.
- If you perceive the world and what happens to you as the result of your own behaviour, you have an internal locus of control.
- If you see the world as a force that is external and beyond your control, you have an external locus of control.
It’s important to note, however, that locus of control is a continuum. No-one has 100% external or 100% internal locus of control. You’ll lie somewhere on the continuum, and this is often influenced by mood and circumstance.
However, if you want to truly take control of your own destiny and achieve your ambitions, you want to move towards the right of the continuum – an internal locus of control.
External Locus of Control: Outcomes are outside of your control, believed to be determined by fate and independent of hard work and personal decisions.
- Blame outside forces for your circumtances
- Often credit luck or chance to personal successes
- Don’t believe that you can change your situation through your own efforts
- Frequently feel hopeless or powerless in the face of difficult situations
- More prone to experiencing learned helplessness
- Tolerates aversive, painful or unpleasant situations even if they’re avoidable, resulting in poor results and unfufilled potential.
Internal Locus of Control: Outcomes within your control, believed to be determined by your hard work, attributes and personal decisions.
- Believe personal thoughts and actions impact your life
- More likely to take responsibility for your actions
- Tend to work hard and achieve the things you want
- Less influenced by the opinions of others
- Have a strong belief in you own ability to reach goals and complete tasks
- Feel confident in the face of challenges
- Often achieve great success in the workplace.
Based on these lists, you can help your team to understand where they lie on the continuum, and how they can model their behaviours around a more internal-focused locus of control.
Often, how we react in the moment comes down to mood, but we can learn to consciously control how we feel about situations – and therefore how we react to them.
Sales managers need to be able to encourage a solutions-orientated culture that celebrates and recognises individuals who live out these values and exemplify resilience. If this happens, your organisation will naturally see more positive attitudes around the workplace.
Do This:
Help your sales team look at responsibility in a new way
Begin with these two disciplines: Ability and Response
Ability: We don’t always have the abiltiy to change how the world treats us
Response: But we can change our response to how we are treated.
In other words, how we react to things is in our control, even if what happens isn’t always in our control. Your sales manager’s goal is to help their team members move into ‘positive response’ mode.
Here are four tools you can share and reinforce with your sales team:
- Recognise the reality that you always have a choice. Making no choice is actually a choice – you’re just choosing to allow other people and events to decide for you.
- Set goals for yourself. Once you have goals, you can work towards achieving them. You’re now controlling what happens in your life. The more control you have, the more self-confidence you’ll build up.
- Develop your decision-making and problem-solving skills. These skills lead directly to confidence and a feeling of control, but they need to be exercised and used on a daily basis.
- Pay attention to your self-talk. When you hear yourself saying things like “There’s nothing I can,” “I had no choice,” or “It was beyond my control,” step back and remind yourself that you do have a degree of control, even if it’s just in the way you react to the situation and think about it – you always have control. The question is whether you exercise it or not.
Assess the health of your sales organisation
Purposely designing a culture and training materials to promote a positive, resilient and solutions-oriented mindset and reinforcing these elements within the sales force are two of 322 measures of a world-class Sales Organisation.
ThinkSales Global is a specialist revenue engineering consultancy.
We assist our clients to deliver market-defying results through strategic and tactical intentions within a Sales Organisation Maturity Model that addresses the five key pillars of high-performing Sales Organsations, namely:
- Competitive Strategy
- Customer Engagement
- Sales Talent
- Sales Management
- Sales Enablement
How does your Sales Organisation stack up? Find out by taking the ThinkSales 5 Pillar Strategic Sales Assessment™.
This first-of-its-kind 360-degree gap analysis report enables your Sales Leadership team to assess its strengths and detect weaknesses and impediments to revenue growth across the five pillars.
Click here for more information on the ThinkSales 5 Pillar Strategic Sales Assessment™.
