April 2023
Announcing my New LinkedIn Learning Course
We’ve finished the first quarter of the year and whether the U.S. and other countries are technically in a recession or not, many organizations are feeling the effects of economic headwinds.
So, I’m pleased to announce my new course with LinkedIn Learning:
Sales Strategies for an Economic Downturn.
While an economic downturn may lead your clients to think twice about their finances, it also presents an opportunity for you to gain market share and launch new products and services. Through this course, you'll:
- Learn how to align your business goals with your sales strategy
- Find out how and why to leverage expertise to get involved early in the sales process
- Explore ways to use sales insights and embrace your role as a sales coach
- Consider how to differentiate your customer’s sales experience with value and provide feedback
- Discover three key indicators that your team should focus on
- Learn how to identify hidden needs, use sales calls to create a new solution for your customer, and develop a referral process to fill the pipeline with your ideal prospects
Join my LinkedIn Live Q&A!
In coordination with my new LinkedIn Learning course, I'm hosting a Q&A on strategies for an economic downturn. Join me on Tuesday, April 18, at 10 AM Eastern to ask any questions you have and engage in what is sure to be a productive conversation.
Be sure to follow me on LinkedIn to learn more about other upcoming Live events.
Individual Leadership: Focused Attention is Your Difference-Maker
Perpetual business has many of us scrambling through days full of multi-tasking and giving continuous partial attention to many things at once. Unfortunately, this unfocused approach doesn’t allow you to create strategies, solve complex problems, coach and develop talent, or do anything else requiring deep expertise.
Psychologist Gloria Mark writes in her book, Attention Span, that you likely only have a couple of 90-minute to two-hour windows of “peak” attention in any given day. Knowing this, it’s critical to become more intentional and stop squandering peak time in routine meetings or emailing. Consider what requires your best performance: it’s these minutes and hours that make the difference in your results. Schedule accordingly.
Organization Leadership: Don't Tolerate Poor Performance for Too Long
I’ve worked alongside many executives who made the hard decision to fire a senior team member. I never heard anyone say, “I should have given them more time.” I regularly see executives put up with incompetence and missed expectations for too long, usually because they hope the individual will turn things around. By failing to correct the behavior, you create two other problems:
- Their performance reflects poorly on you. Other team members begin to wonder how you could not be aware of how this person is impacting the team’s performance. They begin to question your judgment and competence.
- Giving incompetence and mediocrity a pass is demotivating to others (especially high performers). When other team members see that poor performance is tolerated, it dampens their drive to go the extra mile.
This doesn’t mean you ought to immediately dismiss every employee who is not meeting expectations—but I bet you know exactly who I’m talking about in your organization.
World Leadership: Personality Tests or Judgment
Since the pandemic, there has been an increase in the use of personality testing for hiring and promotions. I used to work in the business of psychometric assessments and employee surveys. While I don’t dismiss the data in these instruments, it’s important to know they are not a substitute for human judgment. They may provide data points to be used in a discussion, or a hypothesis to be tested in your observations, but they aren’t a proxy for making decisions and evaluating talent.
This is doubly true when using these assessments to evaluate current employees, where there is substantial performance and observational data available to you; however, for too many leaders and HR departments, these assessment results are treated as if they arrived carved on stone tablets.
Don’t forget that leaders are paid for their judgment and ability to assess talent and performance, something not even the most scientific of tests can reveal with accuracy.
Discover Key Ways to Motivate Your Sales Team During a Recession
Take a look at some of the key points from my latest LinkedIn Live session on motivating your sales team during a recession, then check out the full video here
