Sales can be a demanding, stressful career. Sales representatives are constantly striving to meet their key performance indicators (KPIs) and may earn a significant chunk of their income via commission. This can create a high-pressure environment that undermines your team’s performance and leads to burnout.

To achieve long-term success, training professionals can help address the stress that plagues most sales teams by teaching compassionate leadership. An effective, compassionate stress management program can alleviate pressure and improve morale at the company.

A compassionate approach to sales management can improve business operations, too. Rather than blaming underperforming sales reps, compassionate leaders should identify areas for improvement in the firm and seek to empower employees. This can increase efficiency at work and lower turnover rates.

Compassion in Business

The business world can be uncompromising in its demands on businesses. Competitors are always striving to outperform one another, and consumer trends are in constant flux. This can produce a high-pressure environment that undermines employees’ well-being and reduces the effectiveness of your sales team.

Leading with compassion can alleviate stress and improve performance by giving folks the assurance they need. Compassionate leadership, which focuses on developing relationships and valuing employees, results in more engaged and motivated staff, too.

As a training leader, you can further relieve pressure by encouraging self-compassion. As the name implies, self-compassion is all about taking care of yourself and treating yourself with kindness. This is crucial in a high-pressure environment like sales, where folks may erroneously connect their sales volume with their self-worth. Encouraging self-compassion skills (like journaling and positive self-talk) can increase the resilience of your team and help you address the common causes of pressure that your employees may feel.

Teaching Compassion

Often, compassion is thought of as an inherent ability. However, in the business world, compassion is comparable to a muscle group that needs to be trained and maintained for people to utilize every day. As a learning leader, you can teach compassion in a variety of ways that you think would suit the sales team the best.

Ultimately, your lessons should focus on the core components of compassion. A part of this includes self-reflection. You can utilize personality surveys to help your sales team understand their strengths and how they can apply these strengths to these roles.

Another core resource is empathy. Compassion and empathy go hand-in-hand, and they can’t be done without the other. Similar to compassion, you can train empathy within your sales team. You can do this by establishing an exercise where each sales member should put themselves in the shoes of their clients. The more they practice this, the more they’ll utilize it in their typical roles.

Case Studies of Compassion

Many learning leaders may be worried about the time-spend that teaching compassion may involve. However, the pursuit isn’t fruitless. Countless brands have used it and found that their productivity and motivation improved. One such example is LinkedIn. In a graduation speech given to the Wharton School of Business, LinkedIn’s CEO, Jeff Weiner explained that compassion not only made the company more motivated and a generally happier place to work, but it also prevented potentially disastrous situations. Thanks to compassionate leadership, the head of social impact, Meg Garlinghouse, reached out to Weiner about worries she had about a new product the company was launching and how people in adverse situations would receive it.

Not only did a compassionate environment encourage Garlinghouse to speak up about a concern, but she was able to put herself in those in differing circumstances of her own. Without it, the product wouldn’t be as successful as it is today, and the company would’ve been worse off.

Giving and Receiving Feedback in Training

As you go about teaching compassion to a sales team, it’s important to keep your door open. Just as you provide feedback for the sales team, you should expect just as much, if not more feedback for the training itself. Timely, open-ended surveys give your team a chance to reflect on the stress they’re under and will give you a clear focus for improvement.

This can be worth its weight in gold, as you may find that an operational issue is actually impeding the growth of your company. By approaching the conversation with compassion, you give folks a chance to express their concerns, protect their well-being and help them maintain a sense of perspective.

Respond quickly to survey feedback to address stress and show you care. For example, if a survey shows that the training impedes on work-life balance, you should spend some time fostering better boundaries at work. This is particularly important if you work remotely, as some staff will work long overtime hours when they should be logged off and resting with their family.

You may need to reassess your team’s KPIs to relieve pressure on your employees, too. This is particularly important if you offer a commission bonus to employees who hit their sales targets and convert a high percentage of their leads. Compassionate leadership requires you to account for the reasons why someone may struggle to meet their KPIs and make adjustments to their targets.

Adjusting KPIs is crucial if you want employees to engage in extra training initiatives. If you fail to act compassionately and adjust KPIs, folks will resent training opportunities and will be forced to work overtime to meet their targets. This undermines their work-life balance and causes undue stress to otherwise engaged employees.

Conclusion

Relieving the pressure your sales team faces is crucial for the long-term success of your company. Failing to lead with compassion will lead to high turnover and cause burnout amongst your teams. Help folks perform at their best by encouraging self-compassion and delivering feedback with care. This will show employees that you care about their well-being and are invested in their growth.