How to Prioritize Your Time

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August 16, 2022 | Mark Altman

So many of us tell ourselves that we should focus more on our priorities and passion around our jobs. That we should spend more time with our respective teams for coaching and development. But the excuse consistently seems to be we don’t have time and are too busy putting out fires. If this is you, it’s time to stop being reactive and regain control of your time and choices to become more proactive.

If you were to have more time due to fewer meetings, more efficient time management, the additional question is how would you spend it? Have you thought about what you would do with your newfound time? Here are a few ideas:

  • Reflection time: Check in with how you are feeling. Fatigued, triggered, disengaged, demotivated?
  • Mental health time: Decompress and relax.
  • Meeting preparation:
    • Proactively mentor and coach instead of reactively catching up.
    • Review notes from your last coaching meetings and follow-up.
      • What strategies did you team try to employ? How have they been working?
      • What habits are they working on?
    • Be strategic and work on high-level problem-solving. What is the biggest problem on your plate?
  • Sales and customer service
    • Observe calls.
    • Increase customer touches.
  • Secret sauce: What techniques are you using? How are you transferring knowledge?
  • Strategic planning: Forecast and pipeline.

Enjoy this post? Contact us at MindsetGo to empower your leaders and teams to build confidence, develop skills, and shift mindsets and habits for lasting change.

Being Accountable When Disappointed

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August 3, 2022 | Mark Altman

When dealing with a sales prospect who gives you all the signals that they are going to buy, including making an actual commitment, what do you do when they change their mind or bail on you?

When you feel wronged by someone else, a person breaks a promise, doesn’t follow through on their commitment, or you are generally disappointed by someone’s actions, it’s important to reflect on what you could have controlled and what was out of your control.

You have four choices in these scenarios. Think of which one you typically choose:

A. Rationalize and tell yourself you dodged a bullet because they are showing they aren’t true to their word. This may be true but you can’t completely be sure.
B. Unreasonably criticize yourself for being fooled and second-guess whether you can trust people in general or people like them.
C. Reflect on your role in the process and consider that they may not have seen enough value in your solution OR in you to move forward and they simply changed their mind.
D. Be assertive, pick up the phone, and ask what happened.

The right choices are C and D. By choosing C and reflecting on your role, you flex your self-awareness muscle to see a potential blind spot in the sales process. By choosing D, even though the prospect/client may not respond or tell the truth to give you the closure you are looking for, asking for the truth provides an opportunity for learning and growth and perhaps how to adjust your process moving forward.

Enjoy this post? Contact us at MindsetGo to empower your leaders and teams to build confidence, develop skills, and shift mindsets and habits for lasting change.

MindsetGo Acquires Whole Health Co, LLC to Address the Great Resignation and Build Engaged and Effective Workforces

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Boston, MA – January 6, 2022 | MindsetGo announced today the acquisition of Whole Health Co, LLC, a corporate wellness company offering custom services for businesses and schools. Whole Health Co-founder Patty Burke, CHC, CLC, joins MindsetGo as Director of Wellness, bringing her expertise in lifestyle habit change and an experienced team of health coaches and wellness experts to MindsetGo.

The acquisition expands MindsetGo’s existing organizational development services to also include mental, physical, and emotional support. These expanded offerings will in turn foster happy, productive, and resilient employees both in and out of the workplace.

U.S. employees are resigning in record-breaking numbers (one in four workers quit their jobs in 2021). This phenomenon, dubbed by economists as the Great Resignation, immediately presents employers with challenges including a depleted workforce, employee engagement, and retention. Organizations are seeing their leadership burn out while experiencing higher levels of anxiety and stress due to increased workloads and the additional challenges of remote work.

“When organizations evaluate their biggest challenges, mental and emotional wellness are typically not on the top of the list,” said Mark Altman, Founder of MindsetGo. “In fact, emotional intelligence and resiliency directly support people’s ability to manage themselves, cope with difficult people, navigate conflict, and adapt to change.” Whereas companies once invested in employee wellness simply to help lower health insurance costs, they are now prioritizing it to retain and support their talent. With the high cost of turnover (in some cases, one to two times an employee’s salary), they can’t afford not to invest in their employees’ well-being and success.

“More than ever, companies need support for attracting and retaining top talent as well as overcoming the challenges of an unstable labor market,” said Burke. “Providing support, resources, training, and personalized coaching for valued leaders and staff is critical for boosting employee productivity and ultimately, enhancing bottom lines.”

Survey data from Ginger’s “Third Annual Workforce Attitudes Toward Mental Health Report” revealed that a stunning 96% of CEOs consider their employee mental health efforts adequate, while only 69% of employees agree, revealing a gap between policy and initiative. What differentiates MindsetGo from other training and coaching organizations is a philosophy that focuses on habit change. Both Altman and Burke believe in going beyond simply educating clients, to helping people translate knowledge into action. They provide proven strategies, guidance, and encouragement that motivate people to take the steps they need to thrive, and not just survive, in both their personal and professional lives.

For more information, please contact MindsetGo.

 

About MindsetGo

MindsetGo empowers leaders, teams, and individuals to build the confidence, develop the skills, and embrace the mindset to create lasting habit and behavior change. Our methodology to support people in becoming more confident and effective communicators is based on helping them develop and use three communication components: emotional, multi-generational, and conversational intelligence. Being a confident communicator is not just the way you act, talk, and look; it’s a habitual way of thinking and reacting to various life situations.

Contact Mark Altman at 978-793-1159 or maltman@mindsetgo.com

 

Overcome the Loyalty Objection

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Loyalty isn’t deserved, it needs to be earned. How to overcome a prospect’s guilt regarding staying with an existing service provider.

If a prospect truly believes your service is better and would prefer working with you, then it would be a no-brainer for them to move forward right? The problem is, even when people know the right decision to make, they are conflicted by being disloyal to their current provider. The following is a good approach on how to overcome that obstacle.

  1. Be empathetic. This is where Emotional Intelligence comes in and why I prioritize this set of competencies above all else in sales and leadership. Validate their concerns and be curious to why they value the existing relationship as it will give you a perspective on what they fear they would lose in addition to qualities they would want to maintain in their next relationship.
  2. Let them know an authentic story where you were faced with the same challenge and how you overcame it.
  3. Share a story about a previous prospect and how they were able to move forward and overcome this fear of disloyalty. There are three types of stories that may apply:
    • If it’s not allegedly broken, don’t fix it story – a former prospect who several months later recognized specific benefits despite having a fabulous relationship with their previous supplier. If your prospect talked to his client, they would say “Thank Goodness I made this change.”
    • I didn’t know what I was missing story – because people fear change, they don’t actually take the time to assess or evaluate their current service provider instead they make choices based on emotion. This would be a story of how you came in and did a diagnostic, assessment, or consult to show the benefits of change and why despite their loyalty to their current provider, the prospect should have made this change a long time ago.
    • Proactive vs Reactive story – A prospect who kept postponing because of their guilt over being disloyal and then had to change reactively because their current provider couldn’t deliver, didn’t have the knowledge or experience, or didn’t have the resources to solve their newfound problems.
  4. Don’t Defend and Justify – whenever salespeople are faced with an objection there is a tendency to want to defend it or justify why you/your company approaches it the way they do. I coach the opposite. Instead of wanting to prove the prospect wrong, use discovery and inquiry methods to find out what is really going on. When a prospect says they are conflicted about changing vendors and they are going to stand pat, you can ask the following questions to gauge what level of dissatisfaction they actually feel. *Remember tone is very important when conveying these questions.
    • If you are feeling conflicted about changing, what prompted you to bring us in here in the first place? (Remind them why they asked you to come in as their guilt might have distracted them)
    • When is the last time you tried an alternative or did an apples to apples comparison to ensure you are getting the best solution?
    • If you were to make a change, are there specific aspects of service, quality, performance, etc. you feel like you would be losing?
    • If you had a magic wand and your current provider could improve on a few things, what would you tell them?

Often prospects need an alternate perspective because it is an innate human quality for many people to anticipate or fear the worst. Remember, if you are dealing with someone who is conflict-avoidant, their fears might be irrational, but without an alternate perspective they will never know.

To address this, I ask “If you told your contact you had found a better solution, what would you be worried that they would say? Once the prospect articulates their concern, I turn the tables and ask “If the roles were reversed, what would your expectation be? In other words, if someone you had a solid relationship with came to you and said they were switching from using your product or service and had practical and tangible reasons to do it, would you hold that against them? The answer would typically be no. Unless you have a signed contract, there is no obligation to stay with a vendor purely out of loyalty. It’s your job to help your prospect identify what really matters in choosing a service provider and recognize that loyalty only goes so far.

As a final thought, I close this technique by acknowledging to the prospect a core value of mine to reinforce that I would expect and hope to be held to the same standard if I was the vendor and a competitor attempted to replace me.

To learn more about our Sales Emotional Intelligence program, or to learn more about the various MindsetGo offerings, please visit MindsetGo.

I Don’t Know

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What is so hard about those three little words? Is it that we assume people will question our knowledge? Or our credibility? Maybe it is what those words tell us about ourselves that makes us so uncomfortable. The good news is that being able to say “I don’t know” speaks more to your ability to be self-aware and honest, rather than being an indictment of your self-worth. In sales, prospects want to deal with people who are authentic and won’t BS them. The second you articulate “I don’t know”, prospects care more about what you’ll do to find the right answer and whether those resources are reliable. For all the reasons or excuses salespeople provide for why deals fall through, the last time I checked, none of them included “I lost the deal because I couldn’t instantly answer a question.” So what are your options when you’re stumped?

Qualifying

The simple answer is you can start your response with qualifiers like, “That’s a good question, I have never been asked that before, or Here’s what I can tell you now….” Follow the qualifier by communicating how and from whom you will find THE answer and when you will let them know. This leads me to the resources you have at your company.

Many young salespeople rely on their boss or their colleagues to jump on calls with them or to fill in the gaps they are still feeling unsure about. It is an outstanding way to get accurate information and it could also be an obvious indicator, that this person needs more training, either in general or in a more specific area. Additionally, in a sales leader’s haste to manage their workload, they may miss cues when a salesperson brings them isolated questions in hopes of not stalling a potential deal.

Admitting you don’t know something doesn’t destroy trust; it builds it

Ironically, I find those three words have often had a positive impact and created trust in the early stages of a relationship. When a prospect asks me how I can help or what they need to do differently, many times I answer, “I don’t know” because I would need to know more information and then convey that we can craft a solution together. This gives the prospect peace of mind that I am not offering a quick-fix, templated approach and is also consistent with the core values I practice.

Close Encounter of A Different Kind

You are going to encounter new questions all the time and frankly, if you don’t know the answer, there’s a good chance someone on your team doesn’t either. It’s hard enough to admit that you don’t know something to a prospect but admitting it to a sales leader who believes s/he has already trained you on these details is an uncomfortable proposition. What about asking this question in front of the team and opening yourself up to potential ridicule? As daunting as this sounds, it is likely many of your sales colleagues will be happy you asked because not only were they also uncomfortable asking that question, it’s often the one they wished they had the courage to ask themselves.

Ignorance is Bliss

The best sales leaders create a workplace culture where not only are their direct reports comfortable asking questions directly to them, but also in front of the group so everyone can benefit. I also recommend to sales leaders that they aggregate these questions into an internal FAQ for scaling and onboarding purposes because if one person asks, most likely others will have the same question down the line.

If you chose sales as your profession, you are most likely competitive and ideally seek every bit of information you need to be successful. By giving incomplete or inaccurate answers you risk your reputation, success, and as important, a potential customer’s trust. We need to spend less time being ashamed of what we don’t know, and more time taking the initiative to increase our knowledge base. There is no harm in being uninformed, only in pretending not to be and not doing something about it.

To learn more about virtual, employee, or client engagement contact us at 978-206-1535 or info@mindsetgo.flywheelsites.com.

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