As leaders, we can agree that employee engagement impacts business performance at every level, so it is safe to conclude that companies are only as successful as their employees are engaged. Positive employee experience and high levels of employee engagement are reliable predictors of job satisfaction. As the old saying goes, “Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your customers” from J.W. Marriott, Jr.
There are many facets to developing a motivational employee experience, but It starts with understanding the work that is done day in and day out at the ground level. It is critical to actively engage in the work we are asking our team to do. By rolling up our sleeves and working alongside them, we gain firsthand insight into the friction points of your sales process. This strengthens our relationships with employees and enhances our ability to deliver exceptional value to our customers. Personal interaction with procedures helps us identify challenges our reps encounter on the front lines and better support our teams to identify solutions.
Employee retention can be directly correlated to the workplace environment. In their most recent State of the Global Workplace report, Gallup found that top-quartile business units (companies experiencing lower turnover and absenteeism and higher productivity and employee wellbeing) achieved 23% higher profit than bottom-quartile units. Employee experience directly correlates to company success. When employee experience is high, sales are high! High employee experience also correlates to a company’s ability to adapt and innovate, which is essential for future performance.
When it comes to sales, the most impactful strategy I have seen improve employee experience is conducting client calls together, sharing space, and prospecting together, which will help you understand the friction points for your sales reps.
Creating an environment of Respect and Accountability
Provide Everyone with the Tools to Succeed:it is fundamental to the business to do everything in its power to give employees the tools they need to thrive in their roles.
– Set clear and realistic expectations
– As needed, work one-on-one together, conducting client calls and prospecting
– Learn the friction points of your sales process to know how to address issues
– Provide your team with the most up-to-date technology to make their jobs easier and find hacks that will save them time
Debunk Industry Norms to Customize Employee Experience
There is an “industry norm” that I strongly believe is hurting organizations. When hired, employees are told they have 90 days to perform, or they could face termination from their positions. In the past two years, I have witnessed firsthand this customary pressure does not hold true for all and leads to more fear and fewer results.
Set Realistic Expectations
In Consulting Services, it could easily take a year to perform successfully in a sales position. Giving realistic timelines for building strong customer relationships, understanding the tech landscape, and strategically solving business challenges to deliver value and ultimately drive profits takes time! If you have been working alongside your team, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how to support your employees by playing to their strengths and minimizing their weaknesses.
Invest in Retention to Avoid Turnover
Retention and turnover have an impact on the internal sales team and organization as a whole, but it also largely impacts the customers. When you lose a sales representative who has been building relationships with stakeholders for years and is suddenly gone, you have just lost their customer insight, intellectual property, and all the trust they have built with the client to help make them more successful. Our core covenants are attitude, teamwork, and discipline. If my sales team comes in with these covenants daily and I can continue to invest in them, avoiding turnover, that will always be my first priority. I promise you will be better off for this approach, and so will your customers and sales. It is impossible to quantify how much turnover impacts an organization and a company’s growth.
Tackle Technology
Keeping up with rapidly evolving technology can be challenging, even for those experienced and comfortable in the tech space. When considering all the new technologies, it is important to consider your business and employee experience.
– How are you incorporating them into your business process flow of sales?
– How are you using it to make your employees’ jobs easier?
– Are you thinking about security and how you are securing your data?
– Will the product you select easily integrate into your other systems and tools?
These are just a handful of things to consider when adopting and implementing new technology in your organization. To ensure the above is happening without a snag, there are numerous ways to stay current with the technology landscape. A few ways that we implement these at AIM are:
1.Recon and Update:
Encourage your employees to share technology that their customers are talking about, and consider having technology evangelists host monthly internal technology events to update the company on new technology, tech trends, new releases, etc. Your company has to make a concerted effort to stay on top of the technology industry; otherwise, it will pass you by, and you will miss the opportunity to improve employee engagement and organization sales.
2.Accept the Budget
Let’s face it: Clients want to do more while the budget remains flat or even gets cut. As a leader, you need to empower your employees to think about how they can use current technology to accelerate and innovate for our customers. You may think the answer is new technologies, but a survey from WalkMe uncovered that 22% of the enterprise leaders surveyed can confidently say that employees do not know how to use current technologies correctly. Without clear steps and change management to utilize current resources, organizations will not realize the RIO of tools they have already invested in. Your employees must have learning and development support for using technology related to internal and external tools and resources.
3.Confronting the Future
We have been in an economic downturn for the last two years. Although I am unsure if it will get better anytime soon, I see constant turnover with organizations making shortsighted decisions. If you can afford to retain your staff, you will improve the company culture tenfold. Retaining your staff right now can create opportunities for the future, versus laying off staff now and making shortsighted decisions. The mindset that we have at AIM Consulting, which I encourage organizations to adopt, is to think of yourself as a 100-year company, not a 5-year company. Easier said than done, but if you make decisions with a 5-year mindset, you could be impacting the larger trajectory of the business. A 100-year mindset can result in decisions for the company’s and your employees’ betterment in the long term.
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