It’s a new year, a time for renewal and an opportunity to look ahead and to make plans for the future. This is as true of the sales profession as any walk of life and we know that the most successful salespeople have absolute clarity on what they want to achieve by setting themselves specific goals and measurable targets distilled into tangible actions that will drive success. Perhaps less intuitively high-performers also look back. Not to berate themselves or to ruminate on failure but to learn from what went wrong. Appropriately negative emotions enable people to reflect and to consider feedback so that they can achieve a better outcome in future.
Resilient people use positive emotions to rebound from, and find positive meaning in, stressful encounters. Research by psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, showed that a ‘golden ratio of positivity’ (not too much, not too little) creates wellbeing, enabling individuals to display resilience (the ability to “bounce back” from stressful experiences quickly and effectively). Or ‘bouncebackability’ as the former Crystal Palace manager, Iain Dowie, called it.
So as you plan for success over the next 12 months, don’t forget to look back and identify those scenarios where you can do things differently to achieve better results.
Jim Bloomfield is a Director of Bloojam Consulting with 20 years’ experience of using business psychology to develop salespeople and leaders. He is a member of the Association of Business Psychology (ABP) and the British Psychological Society (BPS) and has successfully helped some of Britain’s best-known businesses exceed their sales goals.
Bloojam Consulting offers a range of robust recruitment and development tools and interventions, including the Acuity for Strategic Sales suite of psychometric assessment and development tools.