Are You a Leader or an Enabler?

I was recently training a group of senior sales executives and asked them to answer the question, "We could increase our sales and profits if I only we could.............?"

The answers I heard were, "if only we had more advertising, if only the competition wasn't so tough, if only the market would improve, if only we had new brochures, if only we were a bigger company, if only we were a smaller company, if only......."

As I expected, the majority bemoaned a series of external obstacles that their sales people claimed prevented them from increasing sales. The sales people had used these excuses for so long that they had become part of their belief system, and led to a lack of productive behaviors and activity.

For example, let's say a team member comes to you explaining that they are behind goal because they can't generate enough new business. Maybe you made a comment such as, "The market is tough right now, customers aren't buying, but it will get better."

As the sales leader, it is your job to not allow your sales team to use obstacles as an excuse. If you accept these obstacles, you become an inadvertent enabler of your team's lack of sales results, a hidden liability and self-fulfilling prophecy to your sales and profit shortfalls. Set them aside, and focus on the things you can control, like developing a cookbook of behaviors and activities that when carried out consistently, will generate sales.  After all, in spite of obstacles, there is always someone in the market generating business, why not your team?

It is essential to set high standards for establishing successful behaviors and activity, and then to provide the sales skill training and ongoing professional development to support these efforts. Competition will always exist and get tougher, the market will always be cyclical, and you will never have enough marketing dollars. So while your competition waits around for external obstacles to change, you need to reinforce a mentality of abundance versus limitations and make things happen, not wait for them to happen. It's up to you to become an enabler of success, not failure. It's the difference between making up excuses or making the sale.