Breaking Through the Wall: 7 Ingredients for Sustainable Performance
Chris Yonker is a consultant and performance expert. You can get more valuable resources on his website at www.chrisyonker.com
Never before in history have sales professionals been asked to do more in their roles, which can lead to a constant state of working at the office and at home. Many organizations are red-lining, and it can appear that everything is hunky-dory. This is an illusion.
Whether your sales team consists of highly motivated individuals who want to move into management or people who are driven to be in sales for a lifetime, each of them has a potential performance plateau. This set point works much like a thermostat that regulates room temperature and is why most people are not able to continually improve their performance and productivity. If someone is truly driven to grow and reach their levels of optimal performance and productivity, they must be willing to change. They also need to integrate 7 Key Areas of Mastery in order to adjust their set point and break through the impending plateaus. These 7 Areas of Mastery are:
- Mastering Purpose: Companies have a vision, mission, and purpose. But how much effort is put into helping individuals align with their own purpose with the purpose of the organization? Let’s face it–few people will occupy a position for a long period of time. How can we help them understand their role as it relates to adding value to others and also contributes to their own projection to the next destination in their career?
- Mastering Mindset: The paradigms and filters we use internally have a massive impact on our ability to not only be effective, but to adapt, problem solve, grow, and change.
- Mastering Time: Time does not exist. Today, people are busier than ever before but few are optimally productive. While we use time as a unit of measure to track and plan, we cannot truly manage time. We can only manage ourselves in relationship to time. Tony Schwartz, author of How we are Working Is Not Working, explains in his book that demand today is overwhelming our capacity. By understanding how we can master ourselves in relation to time, we can then truly live an optimal work-life balance.
- Mastering Engagement: Engagement is about focus, discipline, and truly being present. A person’s ability to stay focused in the moment and give 100% mentally, physically, and emotionally to the task at hand impacts their execution quotient.
- Mastering Communication: Good communication is more than just “listen more and talk less.” It is truly understanding another person’s model of the world and being able to articulate to it. Typically sales people tend to sell the way they like to buy. This works great… if everyone is like you.
- Mastering Empowerment: Knowing what to manage and track in this Age of Information is critical to all management. As is knowing how to build a team of people, align strengths, and create structure so each individual has the freedom to apply their creativity to executing the requirements of their position.
- Mastering Sales: Sales is not just about dials and metrics. It’s the ability of one human being to influence another human being toward a better situation. Knowing how get attention, create trust, and to navigate a prospect’s current beliefs are paramount to truly mastering the process of influence.
These seven areas to master are rather symbiotic. Most organizations only focus on one or two of them when developing their sales team and their culture. As a result, they leave a tremendous amount of sales and personal performance on the table, which they try to squeeze out of their people by working them harder. Business team leaders need to approach how they build their environment at a holistic level and truly integrate all seven areas of mastery. Then, and only then, can they develop members of the team to their true potential. In the coming weeks, we’ll explore each of these seven areas in more depth.
Join SMEI for a webinar on the topic of “Breaking Through the Wall” on May 15, 2013.
