(By Loyd Ford) We just celebrated Thanksgiving. While thoughts move to family and friends this time of year, the sales goals of 2025 still feel distant to us, but those goals are coming. The question now is how to truly supercharge your sales team.
Oh, I know. You may be expecting the ten things you should do next year to give more certainty to your sales. Instead, I thought now would be an excellent time to stay on the topic of thankfulness and how that can benefit you as a sales manager in 2025.
Use the time you have between now and January 2 to arm your sales team with belief and charge them with an ingredient not thought of often enough these days.
- Begin your year with belief in your team and a focus on “time spent selling.” January is a time of renewal. Let your renewal come with prep so that your team has growing confidence in the new year. Let them see your battle plan and their purposeful role in attacking the year.
- Dedicate strategy to spending time with individual sellers with the defined purpose of showing you believe in them. Look for opportunities to be specific about earned praise. Let them know you see their talents and that they are up to the challenge of 2025. Do this on a rotating basis so you serve the entire sales team with a surge of energy and belief that they have what it takes to win.
- Spend time in sales meetings challenging your individual sellers to present on a rotating basis with one rule: No criticism. Think of this exercise as “Many minds are better than only one.” When one seller each week presents, others can be supportive and encouraging. This will have a powerful psychological impact on your sellers. Their senses around presentation will become sharper as a group and as individuals as the year’s goals grow.
- Use public praise. Find specific qualities and successes to praise individual sellers week to week. Spelling out specific praise (seemingly at random) in front of others has a swelling effect on pride, belief, and attachment to the cause: More success.
- Go to lunch once a week with a seller. Learn as much about them as you can. Learn what is truly important to them. Everyone is different. Ask what you can do to help them grow their income. Show them that you work for them and that you are willing to do whatever it takes to help them become more successful.
- Consider offering a professional boxing-style victory belt to the individual seller with the greatest victory of the week, but only award it with real victories. This is about celebration and public recognition in front of the others on your team. Holding this belt up in front of the team can become a weekly rallying cry that your sellers want to hold in their hands.
- Find a way to make sure that the spouse or significant other of each of your individual sellers understands your faith in that seller. Perhaps send the spouse a letter of appreciation and affirmation of your belief in the seller along with dinner for two at a very nice restaurant. Doing this can have the potential impact of turning the individual spouse or significant other into a cheerleader for you, the company, and the goals coming month after month all year long.
We say it all the time to radio: When is the last time you have been encouraged too much?
Think about what your sellers will face in 2025 and make your plans now to give them the extra support that will turn into steel resolve for meeting those challenges and growing their income and your revenue.
You’ve heard it a million times. “Make sure people know you care about them and believe in them and they will do more than you expect.” That’s the game.
Play to win.
Loyd Ford is president and chief strategic officer at Rainmaker Pathway Consulting Works (RPC). They help local radio with ratings and revenue. Reach him anytime at 864.448.4169 or [email protected]. Read Loyd’s Radio Ink archives here.
