[Brendan Hartt is an Account Executive at LevelEleven]
In today’s world, the amount of “things” available to distract your sales team is pretty staggering.
Think of it: Between their need to check emails, make conference calls, review HootSuite streams, share content on LinkedIn…or take a Snapchat of a guy walking down the street with an exceptional mullet when the timing’s right, staying focused can be a major challenge. Your team really needs to manage these distractions, or productivity goals can easily fall out of reach.
This is one of the reasons why technology like FitBit has become so popular in recent years. It’s a physical activity tracker designed to help you keep focused on becoming a healthier person and maintaining that lifestyle. In my experience, just the visibility of having real-time data and trends on how I’m progressing toward my health goals is a great motivator because it helps me weed through all the “things” that could distract me from those goals without it.
In business, staying focused is no different — and there are several ways you can try to handle it. Here are 4 tips I’ve seen work, all of which could be simple additions to an effective management structure.
1) Make short term goals visible in your work space.
Set daily and weekly goals to aim for and make them visible within your office. Long term goals can sometimes be easy to look past, but performance will likely improve when teams are tasked with more frequent, short term goals that create a sense of urgency.
2) Don’t spend a ton on incentives.
Looking for ways to keep your team focused on what matters does not need to be expensive. Many of our clients have found that providing visibility, awareness and recognition around team goals has in fact driven massive improvements on core KPIs and key initiatives. (Read more on that here.)
3) Look at objections as opportunities.
A full day of support complaints or prospecting rejection can be quite discouraging for employees of any tenure. That being said, your most skilled people understand that objections should be viewed as opportunities and respond accordingly. Try keeping your team focused on ways to overcome objections by promoting collaboration on responses to frequently encountered concerns and encouraging employees to put those newly developed responses into practice.
4) Host daily stand-ups.
One exercise our sales, customer success, marketing and engineering teams incorporated into our daily routine includes having brief stand-up meetings. A daily huddle will keep the entire team in the loop on where business stands, and also allow you to all collaborate on lessons learned and issues faced so that you can work together to move the business forward. By serving as a placeholder in everyone’s day, the daily huddle can also save people time on emailing back and forth to set up other meetings.
So if you’re looking for a few ways to help keep your team members from becoming distracted while helping to create visibility and focus around what matters to your business, give a few of these tips a try! Oh – and chances are good you’ll feel like this guy when you do:
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