What Smart Sales Managers Can Learn From Diana Nyad When it comes to your sales revenues, this is the most important quarter of the entire year for inside sales managers. All those net new logos and new initiatives that your teams were chartered with this year must all happen now. In today’s brutal and complex sales world, you are “only as good as your last quarter.” There’s no time to autocorrect your mistakes this year! Do you have what it takes to make your numbers? Be inspired by Diana Nyad — I sure am. The most exciting story this summer is Diana Nyad’s historic endurance swim after four failed attempts over her lifetime. At age 64 she became the first person to swim from Cuba to Key West, Florida without a shark cage. Her two-day nonstop journey across the ocean is an inspiring story of what it takes to make it to the finish line. Lessons learned from this motivational swim can be the playbook for your sales success this year: 1. Don’t let your ego get in the way of getting trained. Inside sales managers have been left in the dark to muddle through tough issues on their own for too long. They are quick to point out deficiencies with their teams, processes, and systems, but slow to admit that they might be getting in the way. Just because your team made their number doesn’t mean you don’t need training on how to retain your top talent, coach them with compassion, and look for the brilliance in each of them. If this is you, check out our Smart Sales Manager Training —it’s the only training designed specifically for inside sales VP’s, Directors and Managers. Diana was already a multiple long-distance swim record holder when began training for the swim in early 2010, moving to the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. But she didn’t rest on her laurels. Over the next six months, she did 8-, 10-, 12-, and then 14-hour swims every other week to build endurance. She also assembled a team of 25 people to help her, including a meteorologist, a satellite oceanographer, and a physician. 2. Prepare your mind for success. Preparation is not just about rolling out comp plans, new territories, and revenue growth goals for the new year, it is about the mental preparation and strategy you need for this endurance marathon and knowing what it takes to make success HAPPEN. Watch any interview with Diana Nyad leading up to her eventual success at the Cuba to Florida swim and you’ll gain one valuable insight: To know you are physically ready is to know you CAN do something. But to know you are mentally ready is to know you WILL do it. “The physical strength goes without saying,” she said in an interview in the NY Daily News. “How is that body going to come up over and over and over without the mind believing it can and not letting you go into negative space?” 3. Quiet the monkey mind, block out negativity, and keep focused. Listening to hours and hours of objections from customers, hearing analytics from your marketing departments, and fielding complains from your beaten-down salespeople can easily spill over on any manager’s level of positivity. Was the latest call blitz campaign a waste of time? Did those 400 leads have a dismal conversion rate? Focus: This is the time for you to be the Motivational Meister and energize your team. Chapter 12 of Smart Sales Manager is dedicated to Contests, Spiffs, and Texts. Inside salespeople need more than tangible financial rewards to maintain daily morale and stay invested in their company’s success. Diana took charge of her own motivation up front, knowing the swim would be grueling. She memorized a playlist of 65 songs that included her favorite artist, Neil Young. She would also count her strokes in blocks, switching from English to German, Spanish, and French. 4. You can’t be tired now. Hopefully, you are not cruising on your reserves — you need all your energy now. A smart sales manager knows that, in the Sales 2.0 environment, the path to sales success is an endurance swim in which you hit your stride towards the end. It takes mental toughness and a positive attitude to keep your team energized. Diana Nyad knew there would be setbacks during her own epic journey and mentally prepared herself to face them. According to NBC News, Diana’s challenge during her endurance swim was to overcome extreme physical pain and discomfort and sleep deprivation and just keep swimming. 5. Don’t give up! This is the time of year when resumes start circulating, sometimes because managers are worried about an upcoming re-org, a bad region, and a weak product line. Let me put it this way: Wherever you go, there you are. Don’t give up! Diana attempted the same swim four times and failed. She started in her late 20s and was discouraged because of debilitating asthma trouble, painful jellyfish stings, and bad weather conditions. Despite this, and after decades or trying, she found solutions to her obstacles and succeeded on her fifth try. 6. Embrace your team. Develop a collaborative approach with your sales teams and encourage cooperation, not competition. Become the compassionate coach who sees the brilliance in your team members instead of pitting them against each other, which only results in top performers guarding their secrets and underperformers feeling helpless and alone. As Diana Nyad walked triumphantly out of the ocean and onto the Florida beach, she said that her swim would have been impossible without her team: “‘I got three messages,’ an exhausted and happy Nyad told reporters. Her face was sunburned and swollen. “One is we should never, ever give up. Two is you never are too old to chase your dreams. Three is it looks like a solitary sport, but it’s a team.’” (CNN) Check out the Latest Smart News Thanks to so many incredible editors, bloggers, sales authors, and reporters who have welcomed my Royal Baby, Smart Sales Manager, with open arms and provided amazing coverage. I had such fun on these podcast interviews with Rain Today “On Buyers Don’t Need Traditional Salespeople Anymore” and with Advanced Selling on “The Future of Inside Sales.” Last month’s book launch was fantastic. Thanks so much to the cute Bettsers for adding lots of spice. Here are some fun shots. Josiane is a regular contributor to the AllBusiness and Salesforce blogs! Sign up to these RSS feeds and get regular updates. Sales Conferences and Kick-offs are right around the corner, so schedule a few hours for Josiane to come in and shake things up with your team. Her fun, memorable, and engaging Smart Sales Kick-off Talk is all about picking up speed in today’s 2.0 ecosystem. The rules have changed, have you? The AA-ISP Summit is next week in Boston, sign up now and use TeleSmart as promo code! Pleeeeeeeeze! Write an Amazon Review for Smart Sales Manager – The post What Smart Sales Managers Can Learn From Diana Nyad appeared first on TeleSmart Communications. bit.ly/13XDiva
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 18:36:44 +0000
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