Belief - What to do when your team doesn't have it
Ingrid Maynard
Sales Team Performance Improvement | Founder and Managing Director l Keynote Speaker
You may already know that I work with a number of sales teams across a range of industries and regions. From time to time I come across teams that don’t believe in either their product/service or that their target is possible to achieve. It might be understandable. It may be rational or irrational. Problem is, once a team has a belief in place, it can be hard to shake, and when it’s not going to serve the business, the outcome is rarely surprising.
Changing beliefs can be tricky because it takes a lot of skill and even more trust between you and your team member to get there. Here are a couple of things I’ve learnt along the way that I hope can help.
ONE: Uncover the origins of the belief
Most unhelpful beliefs can be overcome through this process alone. It could turn out to be a miscommunication, or a situation that has lost perspective for the believer. If however, it’s something tightly held, you will need to have the skills to begin to loosen the team member’s grip on this belief…
TWO: Ask the team member how this belief is helping them
This helps the team member to articulate that it’s not helping them. As this will make them uncomfortable, maintaining rapport is critical. You may choose to adopt an approach of curiosity as you ask them to give you specific examples of how holding this belief has helped them be successful in their role. Stay the course until the team member accepts it’s not helping. Ask them how it could be harming them and again ask for specific examples of this in their role.
Finally ask them to assess if there is more harm than benefit to holding this belief
THREE: Work with them to develop a useful belief instead that would serve them better in their role
If you could choose a belief that was helpful about this situation/target/product/service, what could it be? If you had this belief, what actions would support that belief? If you took those actions, what outcomes could be possible? Would that benefit you? In what ways?
FOUR: Help them to reinforce and strengthen this belief
Ask the team member to go into a situation in the future in their mind’s eye and apply this new belief. What do they see? What are people saying? How does it feel? When positive, get the person to dial it up to 10 and cross their hands or press on their arm to create a physical anchor. Ask them when they can start to act on this belief..
FIVE: Check back in
Follow up in a week’s time to see how they’re going. Ask them to reference specific examples of when they’ve noticed this belief playing out for them and its impact. Ask them how they can use this to challenge other beliefs they might have.