Create certainty where you can
Posted: Mon Jan 27, 2025 8:58 am
Here are five key strategies to lead your team through times of uncertainty.
1. Assure them, this is normal
According to my good friend (and fellow sales nerd) Todd Caponi, author of The Transparency Sale and The Transparent Sales Leader, economic expansion and contraction is normal.
History tells us massive inflation and uncertainty follows explosive economic growth. It happened in the early 1920s during WWI and the Spanish Flu, just like it’s occurring now, post-pandemic.
These ups and downs are a normal part of business (and the human experience).
Your sales team are on the front line of economic, social, and political change. The disruption will continue, particularly as technology advances and disrupts work as we know it today. To enhance your team’s resiliency in the face of adversity, it’s important to empower them right tools and tactics, to maintain an agile mindset, and remind them that “this too shall pass”.
Our brains are prediction machines which is why uncertainty makes peru telegram data them do funny things (for more on the power of certainty. check out my related post on What Having Cancer Taught Me About Sales). As the saying goes, “we suffer more in imagination than in reality”. We ruminate over every possible outcome – trying to think our way to the finish line for every possible scenario. While these scenarios rarely happen, they impact our emotional resilience, productivity, and creativity.
Sales is a competitive, anxiety-riddled, and emotional rollercoaster at the best of times. Throw a recession, pandemic, and mass layoffs into the mix and it’s easy for salespeople to get paralyzed by worst-case scenarios.
With all the noise about cutbacks, hiring freezes, and rising inflation, it’s important to create clarity and certainty in your sales team, in any way possible.
Just as your clients crave certainty, so do your people. Share with them what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’re doing about it as a company. Our brains are hardwired to look for risks and doubt, so providing transparency goes a long way.
A simple way to do this is by creating predictability through regular updates. For example, every week in your team meetings share the latest strategic updates from your senior leadership, let your team air their concerns, and brainstorm ideas to overcome them.
1. Assure them, this is normal
According to my good friend (and fellow sales nerd) Todd Caponi, author of The Transparency Sale and The Transparent Sales Leader, economic expansion and contraction is normal.
History tells us massive inflation and uncertainty follows explosive economic growth. It happened in the early 1920s during WWI and the Spanish Flu, just like it’s occurring now, post-pandemic.
These ups and downs are a normal part of business (and the human experience).
Your sales team are on the front line of economic, social, and political change. The disruption will continue, particularly as technology advances and disrupts work as we know it today. To enhance your team’s resiliency in the face of adversity, it’s important to empower them right tools and tactics, to maintain an agile mindset, and remind them that “this too shall pass”.
Our brains are prediction machines which is why uncertainty makes peru telegram data them do funny things (for more on the power of certainty. check out my related post on What Having Cancer Taught Me About Sales). As the saying goes, “we suffer more in imagination than in reality”. We ruminate over every possible outcome – trying to think our way to the finish line for every possible scenario. While these scenarios rarely happen, they impact our emotional resilience, productivity, and creativity.
Sales is a competitive, anxiety-riddled, and emotional rollercoaster at the best of times. Throw a recession, pandemic, and mass layoffs into the mix and it’s easy for salespeople to get paralyzed by worst-case scenarios.
With all the noise about cutbacks, hiring freezes, and rising inflation, it’s important to create clarity and certainty in your sales team, in any way possible.
Just as your clients crave certainty, so do your people. Share with them what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’re doing about it as a company. Our brains are hardwired to look for risks and doubt, so providing transparency goes a long way.
A simple way to do this is by creating predictability through regular updates. For example, every week in your team meetings share the latest strategic updates from your senior leadership, let your team air their concerns, and brainstorm ideas to overcome them.