BOB FLEXON, FORMER CEO of Dynegy, was on a mission to change the culture at his company. He arrived at Dynegy four months before they filed for bankruptcy. Under his leadership, Mr. Flexon implemented changes designed to change the culture. His belief: change the culture and you will change revenues and achieve long-term success.
Of the many changes he made, one was his focus on being present and in the moment. Dynegy employees were banned from checking email and phones during meetings. (What a concept. People actually paying attention to each other and what is being said during a meeting.) He installed “culture champions” to reinforce the message. When they saw a colleague checking their phone, they’d call out the behavior and announce, “Jennifer, be here now.”
Fear of Missing Out
“FOMO”—fear of missing out—is alive and well in corporate America. Everyone wants to be everywhere but where they are. And too many sales managers are settling for lousy business etiquette, allowing salespeople to be half-present when engaged in conversations. The last time I checked, being half-present isn’t a great selling habit to bring into a high-level sales conversation. That which we do repeatedly becomes a habit, and like it or not, this habit will show up during a sales meeting.
A well-run consultative sales meeting ranges from one to two hours. These meetings require extreme focus from salespeople as they ask questions and listen closely to the answers. But here’s the problem: a salesperson with poor focus skills has difficulty conducting an hour-long sales meeting because they’ve never focused that long before the sales meeting! Their brain starts wandering after twenty minutes so they miss half the conversation. The habit of focus must be developed before conducting a sales meeting because a salesperson can’t apply a habit that has not been developed.
“But, Colleen, you don’t understand. Attention spans are decreasing.” Blah, blah, blah. How many of you would accept that excuse from a surgeon? “Mr. Patient, just giving you a heads-up. I’ll need to step away from surgery every twenty minutes to gather my thoughts. Sorry about that. You know, everyone has a short attention span.”
We can do better.
Love the One You’re With
A couple of years ago, I met with a marketing consultant. The purpose and objective of the meeting was to learn more about each other and determine if there was a good fit in the services she offered and the services we needed. Upon sitting down, she immediately set her smartphone on the table. Dumb move because her actions immediately clued me in that she had not engaged in pre-call planning, since this is a topic I teach, rant, and write about. The real kicker was when the phone vibrated and, mid-sentence, she interrupted our conversation to look at the incoming message. Yup, I was meeting with Pavlov’s dog, and I certainly wasn’t feeling the love. Let’s just say there wasn’t a second meeting.
Leading in a FOMO World
I feel your pain as focus is a new challenge for sales leaders to contend with and teach.
Today’s sales leaders are charged with developing salespeople in a very distracted world. Twenty years ago, the world wasn’t as full of shiny objects. You could actually watch a TV show without ads popping up on the lower left screen! In one second, there are:
• 54,907 Google searches
• 7,252 tweets
• 125,406 YouTube video views
• 2,501,018 emails sent
CEOs, sales managers and salespeople like to disguise the habit of distraction by calling it multitasking. Many people claim to have mastered this skill. What you or your salesperson have mastered is multi-averaging. You’re masterful at doing average work and sadly, accepting average work. The research is pretty clear. When an individual engages in multitasking, the accuracy and quality of the work decreases. It’s called dual-task interference.
Go to a soccer field, basketball court, or football field. Have you ever seen an athlete practicing the game playbook stop and check his or her cell phone and resume practice? No!
But I have seen salespeople (and sales managers) practicing a play from the company sales playbook, stop, check their cell phones, and resume training.
Who do you think will achieve the highest level of mastery? The athlete or the salesperson?
I’m putting my money on the athlete.
Focus, Learning, and Revenues
The battle cry from sales managers, salespeople, and sales gurus is that prospects are more educated and expect more from a salesperson. So what? Salespeople have access to more information and tools than ever before to be successful in life. Quit whining about increasing demands from prospects and customers. Develop your sales team skills to meet the demands. One of the most important skills that the sales force of the future needs is the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn because business and sales will continue to change and evolve. The internet wasn’t even in existence when I started in sales!
But here’s the challenge. Focus is necessary for salespeople to learn new skills. Distractions are the enemy of greatness. David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, provides great insights around this topic. He explains:
Understanding a new idea involves creating maps in the prefrontal cortex that represent new, incoming information, and connecting these maps to existing maps in the rest of the brain. Making a decision involves activating a series of maps in the prefrontal cortex and making a choice between these maps.
Reread that paragraph. Still think you can manage distractions, multitask, and improve critical thinking skills or selling skills? Sorry—until the robots take over, you and your sales team will need to abide by the brain’s rules for learning.
Stop accepting excuses and start expecting excellence. Everyone can improve their ability to focus—and it starts with your leadership. Daniel Goleman wrote an entire book around this topic titled Focus. He shares, “Cognitive efforts like learning require active attention.” It’s your job to teach and model focus and paying attention so your sales team can learn, unlearn, and relearn new skills and knowledge.
Focus, Attention, and Empathy
As discussed in chapter twelve, empathy is a powerful selling skill. It requires paying attention to all the conversations occurring in the room, both the spoken and unspoken conversations. But in order for a salesperson to be able to pay attention and demonstrate empathy, they must first be able to focus. Focus precedes attention and attention precedes empathy.
The twenty-first-century habit of immediately checking anything that beeps, lights up, or vibrates is a habit that decreases a person’s ability to focus. Decreased focus leads to decreased attention—which leads to decreased empathy.
Is anyone seeing a problem with this chicken and egg pattern occurring in sales?
I hope it’s becoming clear how lack of focus affects learning selling skills, the quality of sales conversations, and sales results.
Sales managers, if you really believe that paying attention, being present, and demonstrating empathy is important for conducting effective sales meetings, teach and model the importance of focus to your sales team. Create tech-free meetings and conversations. Salespeople with the attention span of a gnat aren’t going to create consistent sales results for your sales organization.
Be here now.
Focus and Productivity
As you will learn in the next chapter, productivity experts teach the value of calendar blocking to better manage your day. The Franklin Covey organization stresses the importance of working on the important and not urgent tasks. Sales gurus teach and preach the importance of pre-call planning and preparation to make sure you are showing up as a value-added salesperson.
But here’s the problem. The above strategies work, but they only work if a salesperson has the ability to focus. These proven strategies for productivity and success require a person’s attention and cognitive skills.
Salespeople can waste up to twenty hours a month because of their inability to focus. Let’s do some quick math. One hour wasted each day due to lack of focus multiplied by five days a week multiplied by four weeks equals twenty hours of wasted time in one month. If you manage a sales team of ten, you’re looking at two hundred hours. That’s valuable time that could have been invested in acquiring and retaining clients!
Effective salespeople are focused salespeople. They consistently:
• Calendar block—they know what they are going to focus on and accomplish during specific times of the day.
• Focus on accomplishing similar tasks—like prospecting, client review meetings, creating proposals, and entering data into CRM systems. They know moving from one task to another is not efficient or effective. Research shows that when people flit from one task to another, it can take as long as twenty-three minutes to get back on task. That’s a lot of wasted time.
• Manage their technology—rather letting their technology manage them. A study by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byer found that the average person checks their phone 150 times a day. And we wonder why salespeople aren’t achieving quota? The unfocused salesperson spends all day checking messages rather than taking action and achieving sales results.
Mr. Flexon understood the power of focus. While CEO of Dynegy, he had a mounted plaque underneath his computer monitor that stated, “Be Here Now.” A good strategy for all of us striving to be better sales leaders.
Sales Leaders EQ Action Plan
1. Make a decision. Accept the new challenge of sales leadership, one requiring you to teach and model the discipline of focus.
2. Identify areas where FOMO is getting in the way of your sales team achieving results.
3. Teach and model focus during your one-on-one meetings and group sales meetings. Create tech-free zones.
4. Stop believing you can’t do anything to improve attention spans. Become part of the “we can do better” movement.
5. Create your own poster that states: Be Here Now.