“Find something that you value in the admin work and it gives you a way to make this work less annoying to find a different motivator.” – Lisa Cummings in today’s Tip 697
What do you value?
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Lisa Cummings on LinkedIn
Lead Through Strengths Website
List Of Adjectives For Your Personal Career Brand
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Lisa Cummings. Lisa is the CEO of Lead Through Strengths where she helps teams get more productive by using their natural talents at work. Using StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths) for team building, and personal growth, she helps clients get a high return on their effort by using their strengths to strengthen their performance. Here’s she is:
Lisa Cummings: You know, it seems like no matter what kind of sales role you’re in, there’s the inevitable. You’re going to have some sort of admin work that you just can’t stand. This annoying stuff that you have to do. And as you come to it, you decide. Yeah. In order to keep the job in order to be here, I have to get this stuff done. But I’m going to de-value it. I’m going to turn it in late. I’m going to do the minimum I can because I don’t see any personal value in it.
This is a typical view. And if you think about what you don’t value in the admin work, usually it’s the bureaucracy. It’s busywork. It’s the rules. It’s the non-revenue generating activity kind of feel around this admin work. But if you’ve determined, you actually have to get it done. Then it does serve you to figure out how to get it done and not let it take over your headspace. Not let it put you in a procrastination mode or a low-performance mode, or even allow you to show up in your next customer call or prospect conversation when you’re not at your best.
So one way around this, here’s an unexpected way to approach it. That is to find something else you value so that it becomes a different kind of motivator to get the admin work done. If I give you an example, I was working with a salesperson who was just complaining about all of the stuff he had to enter into Salesforce and how no one was ever going to use all of this data. And it was a waste of time to try to recall every conversation and recount it inside of Salesforce. And there were some other admin things like end of the month duties that were in there and do by the end of the month. So he found himself saving it up and putting it all in like a week after it was due.
So his teammate, Bonnie let’s call her. Bonnie comes to him really ticked one day and says, do you know that I miss my grandkids soccer game? Because I had to work on the weekend because you refuse to put your stuff in on time. Well, this was actually kind of hurtful to this person because he’s not trying to be a jerk. He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone else. He was just trying to not do his annoying bureaucratic admin work. So the way he changed this was thinking about relationships as a different value. He was a great relationship guy. It helped a lot in his sales conversation. So why not let it help in the internal practices and processes that have to get done once he reframed it, make the admin work less annoying. He did this by once he reframed it by thinking I care about relationships. I care about the relationship of my teammates as well. So, therefore, I’m going to care about the due date because it affects other people’s lives.
So imagine what do you value? Do you value efficiency? Do you value serving customers at the best way possible? Do you value serving your support team so that they could pull up some of this information and serve your customers with it? Find something that you value in the admin work and it gives you away, yeah, it’s like Jedi mind tricks, but it gives you a way to make this work less annoying to find a different motivator. And that motivator comes from your values and your strengths because if you will use your strengths at work, these natural talents, these natural values, they will strengthen your performance at work and they will keep your headspace and the right place to show up at your best.
Scott Ingram: For more about Lisa and Lead Through Strengths, just click over to DailySales.Tips/697.
Then, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!