What Smart Sales Managers Can Learn From Diana Nyad

September 2013 Newsletter

What Smart Sales Managers Can Learn From Diana Nyad

When it comes to your sales revenues, this is the most important quarter of the entire year for inside sales managers. All those net new logos and new initiatives that your teams were chartered with this year must all happen now. In today’s brutal and complex sales world, you are “only as good as your last quarter.” There’s no time to autocorrect your mistakes this year! Do you have what it takes to make your numbers? Be inspired by Diana Nyad — I sure am.

The most exciting story this summer is Diana Nyad’s historic endurance swim after four failed attempts over her lifetime. At age 64 she became the first person to swim from Cuba to Key West, Florida without a shark cage. Her two-day nonstop journey across the ocean is an inspiring story of what it takes to make it to the finish line.

Lessons learned from this motivational swim can be the playbook for your sales success this year:

1. Don’t let your ego get in the way of getting trained.

Inside sales managers have been left in the dark to muddle through tough issues on their own for too long. They are quick to point out deficiencies with their teams, processes, and systems, but slow to admit that they might be getting in the way.

Just because your team made their number doesn’t mean you don’t need training on how to retain your top talent, coach them with compassion, and look for the brilliance in each of them. If this is you, check out our Smart Sales Manager Training —it’s the only training designed specifically for inside sales VP’s, Directors and Managers.

Diana was already a multiple long-distance swim record holder when began training for the swim in early 2010, moving to the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. But she didn’t rest on her laurels. Over the next six months, she did 8-, 10-, 12-, and then 14-hour swims every other week to build endurance. She also assembled a team of 25 people to help her, including a meteorologist, a satellite oceanographer, and a physician.

2. Prepare your mind for success.

Preparation is not just about rolling out comp plans, new territories, and revenue growth goals for the new year, it is about the mental preparation and strategy you need for this endurance marathon and knowing what it takes to make success HAPPEN.

Watch any interview with Diana Nyad leading up to her eventual success at the Cuba to Florida swim and you'll gain one valuable insight: To know you are physically ready is to know you CAN do something. But to know you are mentally ready is to know you WILL do it.

"The physical strength goes without saying," she said in an interview in the NY Daily News. "How is that body going to come up over and over and over without the mind believing it can and not letting you go into negative space?"

3. Quiet the monkey mind, block out negativity, and keep focused.

Listening to hours and hours of objections from customers, hearing analytics from your marketing departments, and fielding complains from your beaten-down salespeople can easily spill over on any manager’s level of positivity. Was the latest call blitz campaign a waste of time? Did those 400 leads have a dismal conversion rate?

Focus: This is the time for you to be the Motivational Meister and energize your team. Chapter 12 of Smart Sales Manager is dedicated to Contests, Spiffs, and Texts. Inside salespeople need more than tangible financial rewards to maintain daily morale and stay invested in their company’s success.

Diana took charge of her own motivation up front, knowing the swim would be grueling. She memorized a playlist of 65 songs that included her favorite artist, Neil Young. She would also count her strokes in blocks, switching from English to German, Spanish, and French.