How to Help Your Team Stay Productive

Red alert. We have a problem. 71% of salespeople say they are more fatigued than normal or constantly fatigued in their day to day interactions. And my friends, that is what is the foundation and basis for the idea of burnout. Burnout is both physiological and psychological. It is something that's affecting our teams on a daily basis and now and always has. But now with us working from home, couldn't be more enhanced than it's ever been before. Below. Hello everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome. My name is Brian Elcessor. I'm the senior director of sales development at Aircall. I'm so excited to be spending time with you today. A little bit about me spent 10 years in sales, two of those years as a frontline rep, getting my hands dirty before I was absolutely thrown into the fire. And this idea called management and spending my career there so specifically focused in this idea of sales development, how to open up these cold doors. And it's been an absolute privilege to do so. Just a little bit about Aircall before we begin. Aircall is where I live today. We are a 100% cloud based phone system that works with sales and support teams to help them be more productive and more efficient on a daily basis. Burnout is both physiological and psychological. It is something that's affecting our teams on a daily basis and now and always has. But now with us working from home, couldn't be more enhanced than it's ever been before. It's on us to identify this in our teams. It's on us to look for the signs and symptoms that are gonna call out to us that we need to take action and do something today before it's too late, before we lose the interest or the production of our teams. Some things to keep in mind when you're talking about burnout, Burnout is absolutely something we can control. It is something we can control because it's all mostly related to time. How are you spending your time, where are you spending your time? What is going in that time? It's all related. So you as a manager, the leader of time management, need to set the tone and need to have the tools in your back pocket to go to market and help your team feel like they are able to handle the time that's in front of them and take the time to be healthy and contributors to your overall process. Managing burnout's really hard. It's absolutely hard because it's not something that you can just plug in a cord into the side of your human and say okay, how burnt out Are they? You need to actually get them to verbalize it. So I'll give you some examples of things that I've done with my team. The first one and foremost, right away, I actually just sent out a wellness survey to my team talking about things like stress, things about fatigue, sleep, muscle soreness, all of these different things. They're subjective answers, but they all contribute to the overall burnout. When you can get an idea of some of the subjective inputs of your team and turn around their feelings about how they actually feel through a size of their own body and you can take that and put it against their performance metrics. How have they been putting out in terms against a goal, against their activities? You're gonna start seeing correlations, especially over time. So the very first and foremost thing that you can do is go get an idea of what your team's burnout level is. From there, get into your one on ones, start talking to your people, ask them what's happening. And if you're asking open ended questions and you have that relationship with the members of your team, which I, I hope you do, that you can ask those questions. You should be able to start getting ideas around who is saying what in an anonymous survey. And so then you now have a tool in which you can take individual performance ideas, excuse me, performance outputs, and match it to these subjective feelings. You can start mapping this and it's all based on numbers, the same way our performance is, if you can get a quantitative idea. So a wellness survey, for instance, that's based upon on a scale of 1 to 10, how fatigued do you feel? Right? You're gonna have a number that you can correlate those performance numbers to and it's gonna get you a place to start looking at where can I start making an impact on my team? What can I help them do in order to achieve more time, more freedom, more management over their day to be more productive and less burnt out. There's a balance, right? There's a balance between the goal that you have to hit and the amount of empathy that you have to show your team. But I don't see them as mutually exclusive. And I'll tell you why. Because if you're doing your job right as a director, the only way in which you ever operate is in that vein of thinking about your team. You're thinking about their day to day, you're thinking about the world they're living in, you're thinking about everything that they have going on in their job and you're saying, okay, what is it that I can do to help them. And so I think that's actually the answer is that there isn't a balance. It's what can you do to assist your team? And is that assisting their environment that they're working in? Do they have the right setup, do they have the right space? Do they have the right tools and things to be successful or do they have a comfortable workspace to work in? Okay, those are all the things you can control. Are you helping them be successful in the actual job? Are you getting your hands dirty? No matter what level, vp, C level down to the individual contributor, are you, are you getting your hands dirty? With the day to day myself today I was digging for low hanging fruit in Salesforce looking for great opportunities to go and serve to my team and say, hey look, don't forget about this one. Hey, this one seems like it's the right time. Go and do the work. Get in there. If you're a frontline manager, are you on the phone? Are you coaching with your team? Are you giving them that feedback? Not just getting and giving feedback, but getting feedback as well. Are you asking the questions that are necessary to understand what's happening in their world? Everything matters. And the balance is not that there's been this new balance between empathy and performance. It's that you're being mindful more than ever that you're dealing with humans on your team. 67% of sales leaders say that productivity has either stayed the same or increased this year. Makes sense, right? We're at home, we're focused, we're dialed in. Okay, my question's actually to that other 30 some odd percent. What are you doing with your team? Where are you spending your time when you're coaching them? Are you helping them enable themselves and get themselves outside of their comfort zone or outside of their box? Are you giving them different direction or sending them down a rabbit hole of some kind that is not actually translating into productivity or performance. Everything results from leadership and it's a top down thing. So when you give a direction, you got to know that that direction is in line with that performance, with that environment. And I would venture to gu that some of that 33% that aren't feeling like their team is actually making that productivity stride in a remote environment has a lot to do with them not feeling comfortable managing in a remote environment. 65% of sales teams that over perform this year say they had a dedicated sales enablement person to help them get there. Aircol has just that. We have a team of sales enablement experts that Help us do this as well. But I would be lying if I told you that being a sales enablement expert wasn't everyone's job to begin with. You gotta find the enablement ways. And what I mean by that is that if you're in the front lines, if you're in the trenches and you're doing the job every single day, no one knows better than you on what's gonna take for you to help those deals down the funnel. And you need to be able to verbalize that straight up. You need to be able to have that conversation with that team that's helping you be enabled. So everyone is the enablement professional. It's not just one team's job. Sales enablement at Air Call is absolutely that tool enablement, that collateral creation element, content creation element that helps our teams be effective in selling. But it's also the leadership going out and spending time on training on soft skills, things like just the basics, qualification, discovery, negotiation. It's also about relationship building and teaching those skills, soft skills. And it's not just one person's job. So whereas the sales enablement team focuses on content or focuses on tools, or focuses on the things that tangibly the sales team touches in the day to day to help these deals down, enablement also is a job description requirement of every other leader in the org to help those teams get the skills, get the pieces that it takes to win these deals. My final message to you all, and I don't care if you're the chief level of an organization or, or a frontline employee going after that frontline seller going after that sale, okay? At the end of the day, you have to remember this. You could be B2B, you could be B2C. But today we're all human to human and in this environment nothing matters more. If you're going after making that sale, you need to be thinking of your buyer. You need to be thinking about not what they want and what they need. You need to be thinking about the environment they're living today and what does it take in order for you to stand out and be different. Don't be salesy, don't be the salesperson, don't be pitching. You need to be speaking with people and connecting with them on a human basis. If you're a leader, you have a job. You have a responsibility to be thinking about your team at a human level. What is going on in your team's world, what matters, Keep all of that in perspective. That's what's going to be the differentiator. For the rest of 2020, well into 2021 and beyond. And that, my friends, is the biggest takeaway I can give you from this entire thing. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for investing in yourself and spending the time. There's nothing more important, especially in our current environment. Two quick call outs. The first one, the 2021 sales enablement report. You need to get in it and take a look and go dive through some of those stats. Go dive in. Go invest. The second quick call out. You're a remote team. You're trying to figure out how to be more productive, more efficient using the tools you're using every day. You need to give a call out to airquall and go check us out as well. Both links are below. Go check it out.