Anyone that knows me well also knows that I am an avid reader. I’ve always believed that to be a “thought leader” a person must be exposed to new thoughts. New thoughts and ideas help sales professionals create new and innovative ways providing value to clients and increased sales.
One of the consistent “thoughts” that I am seeing in books, articles and podcasts is the need to slow down to speed up. Ask yourself this powerful question:
Am I a transactional business person or a relevant business person?
In their book, 10X Is Easier than 2X, Sullivan and Hardy give great examples of the importance of applying the 80-20 rule. Eliminate 80 percent of the nonsense and non-productive activities in your life. Free yourself up to concentrate on the 20 percent that provides real value to your customers AND increases sales with the right type of client.
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, stresses the importance of carving out time to engage in deep thinking which leads to deep work, valuable work. The reality is:
Jobs that are repetitive and don’t require the deep thinking will be the first to be replaced by AI.
This includes sales managers and salespeople who invest time in transactional activities versus, value add activities. Anyone reading this blog spend more time on email than on learning new ways to be creative and innovative?
It starts with you, Ms. Or Mr. Sales Manager.
What are you modeling to your sales team? Many sales leaders BELIEVE their TIME is best used in teaching their sales teams the latest tactics and strategies of opening up and closing new business.
All good. Except…a salesperson must carve out time to do the deep thinking to put together a good strategy or practice new approaches.
Sales leaders of the future must change up their coaching sessions.
The sales leader of the future will encourage salespeople to take the time to engage in deep thinking. They possess enough self-awareness to recognize that a busy sales team does not equate to a value-add sales team. They know a busy sales team is busy because they are often stuck executing transactional work, not productive work.
The sales leader of the future will measure the traditional KPI’s and sales metrics. AND, they will also measure the amount of time their team is investing in learning, applying new ideas and mastering new skills. They will assign a set number of hours each month for learning and development AND track and measure those hours. This means slowing down and carving out time to practice. Think about it. Without practice, a salesperson defaults to transactional, generic sales conversations. They don’t demonstrate empathy skills or ask provocative questions.
A transactional sales conversation is one that that an AI tool can easily conduct.
The sales leader of the future will work with their team in learning the AI tools that are capable of taking transactional work, busy work or redundant work off their plate. This extra time allows your sales team to focus on productive and value-added work.
Sales leaders, it’s time to teach and reward the behaviors to help your sales team remain relevant in the world of AI.
Good Selling!
