What If You Had to Re-Interview for Your (Sales) Job?

Reevaluation. Just about everyone on the planet is re-evaluating their entire lives. Where they shop, what they eat, who they see, where they go. How they entertain themselves.

Eventually, owners and managers are going to get around to evaluating their teams. In fact, let’s be honest. They probably already are. And when they look at their teams, they are going to be taking on the admittedly difficult task of looking at everyone on their teams. Some that have been there for decades. Some are rock stars. Some, maybe not so much. Some might be able to be re-energized with the proper motivation and given the right tools. For others, the path to thriving in this climate could be a bridge too far.

If your boss is doing this right now, what is he or she saying about you? Are you integral: someone they cannot live without? These are hard questions. They require a level of self-awareness that until now you may not have had to possess.

But now is the time. It is time for you to take an honest and even critical look at yourself. Take a look at these three areas, and ask yourself: Can I be better? Can I improve? What resources do I have available to me to help me with this? Who on my team can I go to? Next week I will give you some answers to these questions that you may not be aware of.

1. Your marketing skills – Marketing is defined as “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.” You are in sales. You know how to identify an ideal target, come up with a value proposition, apply a sales process, and hopefully, you are diligent. But what happens when your normal sales valves get shut off, or at least they are reduced greatly? The phone isn’t working the way it used to, and you know that using email alone is not getting the job done. You can pretty much forget about face to face or group meetings for the foreseeable future. Here is a quick checklist of the most basic marketing activities you should be investigating right now:
   1. An active presence on LinkedIn
   2. Several content creators that you follow to learn and share their content
   3. A beginner’s plan for creating relevant and interesting content of your own
   4. An engagement strategy and a schedule for how to deliver, how often, and to whom
2. Your attitude – How is your disposition right now? Are you operating from a place of abundance, or are you letting a scarcity mindset dominate you? Are you greeting the day with optimism and a belief that you have a serious role to play in helping companies use print to engage with THEIR clients? Do you genuinely believe that it is possible for you and your company to thrive going forward? If you are feeling at all unsure of any of this, how can you get yourself to a place where you see a bright future for yourself?
3. Your Ideas – If you have been paying attention to what is going on in your community, what changes have you seen in behavior and how companies and people are doing business? What ideas have occurred to you as to how print solutions can help adapt to these changes? How do you plan to share these ideas? Are your customers and prospects able to hear this from you? If not, how can you change that landscape?

I hope you have spent some time thinking about how your marketing savvy, attitude, and ideas can help serve not only your customers and prospects but your company as well. Tune in next time for a deeper look into this. And, in the meantime, if you are seeing major issues on how to move forward, please know that I am here to listen and help. Truly.