Take the Time to Reflect

How often does your sales team take the time to reflect?

What do I mean by this?

Look, it’s no secret that salespeople work hard and often put in long hours. And, the focus, rightfully so, is often to make the next sale and ensure the pipeline is always filled with new prospects.

This often leaves little time to take a moment to smell the roses.

That is, far too many sales teams are so stuck in their day-to-day routines that they forget to stop and reflect on what’s contributing to their current successes and what’s holding them back.

Before they know it, they’ve spent the whole year indulged in “business as usual” without accurately understanding where they spend their time, why they spend their time that way, and how many of those hours are actually contributing to their growth.

As I’ve discussed before, one of the best ways to boost an entire team’s success is by identifying the top performer(s) on that team, getting clear on what they’re doing, and then getting the rest of the team to replicate those successes.

But, that can’t be done if nobody is taking the time to pause and reflect on who is doing well, why they’re succeeding, and how it can be replicated.

I’m also willing to bet there are at least a few activities you or your team partakes in which isn’t really moving the needle forward any longer.

• Could your team be writing and storing contact information in a notebook when CRMs are often much more effective?
• Could they be committing to in-person meetings and losing time for travel when they could easily be conducting those meetings via Skype or Zoom?
• Could they keep their inbox “always open” and respond to emails on the fly, losing focus on the task at hand and by being bounced from priority to priority—rather than setting and accomplishing their own priorities?
• Could you have too many tasks on your plate as a sales manager that could be easily delegated to other members of your team?

This list could go on and on, but it takes intentional reflection on your days and weeks to accurately determine what’s working well and what isn’t.

Take some time in the next week (surely the next 7 days provides SOME opening to practice this exercise), sit down with a notepad or at your laptop, and write down some reflections about your general workload, routine, and what can be tweaked and improved.

This is how top performers continuously produce results, learn, grow, and evolve as sellers and sales leaders. They take an active approach to their success!

And, this is one of the best ways to do it.