Are you a radiator or a drain at work?

You spend most of your life at work, so it’s important you spend your time in an enjoyable environment. Yes, sometimes work is stressful or you have to get your head down and focus, but your attitude can affect your work results. So the question is, are you someone that influences results in a positive way or a negative way?

The radiator: Our positive colleague

You know that one person that is always upbeat and positive? They are your radiators. These are the people that look for solutions to problems, get their head down when something needs doing and are always looking for new projects and challenges. These are your natural born leaders and managers.

Of course, this doesn’t mean your radiators can’t have bad days. To make sure these employees are kept upbeat and engaged on even the worst day, make their goals realistic and offer praise when they go above and beyond.

The drain: Our negative colleague

Yes, everyone has bad days, but you do get those employees who constantly complain about their problems. These are the people who look for excuses as to why their results aren’t improving, blame others and drag their feet. This doesn’t just affect their own results but the others around them too.

You need to stop these people from draining the positivity from the office. To do this, identify their issues and work together to create a plan about what they need for help. Give them smaller achievable goals so they can see progress. This will help them build up their positive results and change their attitude to their work. Surrounding them with positive people can also offer that extra boost to their environment.

Balancing the charges

Dealing with positive and negative people requires different strategies, but this can create friction if you don’t balance them correctly. To make sure everyone is on an agreeable level, make sure you personally interact and establish what each individual employee needs in their workspace to feel valued.

Just as we create value for our customers in our products with quality content, we need to do the same for our employees. We can do this by providing them information on what they are doing that is influencing the company’s results and the plan for how they can continue to grow, both personally and professionally.

For sales, this can be achieved by tracking their results through a lead management or CRM system. For marketing, using analytics and PPC identification allows you to track marketing ROI and conversion results to continue and improve results and attitude in the workplace.

3 Steps to Building a Strong Sales Team

A strong sales team used to just rely on a quality product, a compelling compensation plan and an effective way to track sales. While those are still very important to sales, there are 3 other steps you can take to make sure your sales team is stronger than ever before.

1. Hire Millennials

You should always be constantly recruiting for your sales team to keep the atmosphere fresh and upbeat. The youngest generation in the workforce, millennials are confident, upbeat and more open to change than the older generations. They also haven’t developed any bad sales habits, so you can train them to the sales standards you want them to deliver.

Born in the world of technology and instant communication, they are also more natural at picking up new skill sets. The only caveat is that their expectations of work (and indeed their personal life) are sky high.

2. Create a collaborative environment

Sales can be a tricky workspace. The minute one salesperson turns negative, they can often rub off on someone else and before you know it the sales environment becomes toxic. To make sure your sales team is strong and delivering results, you need to keep the positive atmosphere and attitude.

To do this, ask for their opinion on where they see the future of the company going and where they would like to be in that vision. This will help them feel like a part of the bigger picture and encourage them to deliver big results for the future.

Also involve them in the company culture, promoting the values of the company. This will help them to keep in mind the way you want the company to be portrayed in their sales pitches. Selling successfully in the long-term is as much about staying on brand as it is about closing sales. Make sure they know they are the first port of call you go to when you want to push your key company messages.

3. Figure out what really drives your sales team

A set compensation or incentive programme is not always the best way to encourage your sales team to produce results. In fact, a flat set commission plan is often a deterrent that doesn’t push your salespeople to deliver outstanding results. Whatever plan you offer, make sure it aligns to your sales standards that you’ve already taught them. For example, if you want to drive more new business, offer a higher commission for new business.

However, you should also consider what is important to your sales team. Do they work better with flexible hours or are they more productive when you offer them a better work/life balance? Taking these things into account will help your sales team feel appreciated. From there, you won’t even need to push to get them to deliver outstanding results.

For more like this, learn how to build an overperforming sales team in this whitepaper.

For more on the tools marketers can use, download our whitepaper on How To Prove The Worth of Your Marketing Budget.