Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Josiane Feigon, President of TeleSmart.

Millennials are currently flooding inside sales organizations, and their numbers aren’t going to be reduced. They come in a broad range of work personality-types: some are uber-professional superstars with high leadership potential, while others treat the office like a dorm, walk around with their wrecking balls, and have extremely short attention spans.

The challenge of ramping them up and transferring knowledge is big. Since many millennials don’t want anyone telling them what to do, any type of training that involves a talking head or an authority figure is not well received. Here are some issues that inside sales training must overcome if it wants to reach millennials:

Today, we will be hosting this month's #ProspectingChat on AG Saleswork's Twitter account. We will welcome best-selling author Josiane Feigon as a special guest to discuss sales training tips. Here are some details about today's Twitter Chat:

About a month ago, I talked about the challenges I've faced when managing conflict and I offered a couple of ways to address these obstacles that I’ve learned over the years. Since then, I've really made a point to consider alternatives to proactively manage conflict.

However, maybe “conflict” doesn’t have to be such a dirty word. It’s all in the tone with which we choose to approach a potentially contentious situation.  Being assertive doesn't have to be ugly if we come at it from the right angle.

I've always responded best to people who lead by example in the workplace. I find it harder to relate to individuals who are always willing to offer advice on strategies (often unsolicited) when it seems that they rarely, if ever, follow their own words.  

I often think back to my experiences back in my high school days playing sports. The coaches that took the approach of yelling and kicking objects over to get a point across never made an impact on me. When the crap hit the fan, I found that those coaching personalities rarely knew what to do to solve the problem… other than yelling more. I always felt that I was demonstrating the desire and motivation to be part of the team by showing up and doing the best I could. I didn’t need someone yelling in my ear to get me motivated; instead I needed guidance to hone my skills and make me understand what needs to improve.

Every night when I was growing up, my family sat down to a home-cooked meal by my mom (aside from Tuesdays: those days dad was in charge of making spaghetti). Anyway, every night my mom managed to make a delicious meal after a long day at work. She juggled a career, three kids, laundry, grocery shopping, and more. She did it all, and she did it well, and continues to do so today. Now that I recently became a working mom, I truly understand how much effort it takes and while I didn’t think it was possible, I value and appreciate my mom even more now.

The hardest transition I've found when moving into a manager role is the change in relationship between you and former colleagues that you've once worked with. This changeover generally tends to be the biggest challenge for most new inside sales managers, whether they're responsible for training the inside sales team or for managing the managers.

Over the years I’ve seen some common themes from my most successful mentors. Every day, they realized they had to check their ego at the door. We’re in this together and getting things done is NOT a one-man job. It’s a collective effort each and every day.