Stop Letting Your People Whine
When we met with Nick, he was whining…a lot. And, he had some pretty good reasons. He said that his company’s delivery personnel were so ineffective, he would make his customer happier if he simply loaded the products on a truck and delivered them himself!
As we coached him through one upset after another, he made the connection between being pissed off and wasting time.
One day he simply put his complaints aside. He just decided that whining was getting in the way of his success. He could quit or he could stay, but he was determined not to waste another minute complaining, because it limited his ability to succeed.
Anyone who has worked in sales knows that there’s a lot to complain about.
There are customers who:
Have a dysfunctional buying process (e.g. an RFP process) that actually prevents them from making the most intelligent buying decision for their company.
Hold salespeople hostage over things they can’t control such as delivery, service, and billing disputes.
Won’t be honest about the real problems they are trying to solve.
Fail to disclose the difficulties they are having with internal stakeholders.
Withhold difficult truths so they can avoid being the bearer of bad news.
Behave like jerks to drive the price as low as possible.
There are colleagues and other managers who:
Don’t do their job very well, and expect salespeople to handle the mess they leave behind.
Maintain unrealistic expectations of your salespeople.
Increase targets midway through the year when salespeople are smashing them.
Establish compensation systems that cap the amount of money your superstars can earn and therefore reward mediocre performance.
Require endless work-around reports.
Fill their calendar with meetings that cut down selling time.
Salespeople allow these challenges to affect their attitude. The more their attitude drops, the less clearly they think, and the more they complain. They give up internally, and lose the will to find a way around the situation.
You, in turn, wind up giving the same advice which didn’t work before and which won’t work now.
Let’s face it, things would have improved ages ago if people would invest just half the energy they spend on complaining into coming up with a solution.
People whine, complain, and moan when (a) something is in their way of succeeding and (b) they believe they’re powerless and can’t do anything about it. It’s a victim’s perspective. Moaning about something is what we do instead of taking action to fix it or accept it and let it go.
In truth, we always have the power to act and the responsibility for doing so no matter what’s happening. We have three types of power available to us.
Things we can control:
What we do - including the option of quitting our job and finding one we like
What we say - for example, to stop moaning
The attitude we maintain – to see what can be done instead of what can’t
Things we can influence.
We know the people who can change things.
We know the people who know the people who can change things.
Things we cannot control or influence. What we can do is hope they change instead of falling into cynicism and despair about them.
Next time you’re interacting with someone whining about something, let them do so for no more than five minutes and then try this:
Take their upset seriously - find out what it’s about and why it matters to them.
Ask them three questions:
What can you control?
What can you influence?
What’s completely beyond your control and influence?
Then ask ‘Are you ready to do something about it?’
Help them identify what they will do and when they will do it.
Follow up with them to see what happened.
As you get more comfortable with this conversation, you will see things start changing for the better.