During the last six weeks, I’ve observed two salespeople struggling with the same addiction. The performance of both salespeople was being negatively impacted by their addiction – one of them was fired because of it. Although this addiction mostly affects younger people, older salespeople are not immune to it. This addiction is eating away at a key skill for sales excellence, and it’s forging a chasm between salespeople and their customers.
I feel very confident that every reader of this post is a user of the thing these salespeople are addicted to, and many of you have some degree of addiction to it. Hopefully your addiction is not a great as the two salespeople I observed recently, but I bet you wish you could use it less. What is the addiction?
Most salespeople are addicted to their phones. Yes, their phones. I don’t mean they talk on their phones too long, but they can’t stop checking things online. They’re addicted, and they have no attention to truly listen to their customers – a key skill to sales excellence.
The first salesperson noted above used his phone in every internal meeting. It got so bad that his boss set a policy that no phones were allowed in their meetings. This salesperson was lost. In the meeting I attended, he appeared to be going through withdrawals. He was fidgety and had zero attention span. Up to the writing of this post, his behavior in meetings has not improved. This is bad, but nothing like the second example.
A couple weeks later, I received a call from an executive manager at another client. He told me that his sales director wanted to terminate a new sales hire … on his second day. His second day. Why? During every training session, the new salesperson was constantly looking at his phone. He was checking social media, news, personal email, text messages, etc. My advice was to talk to him and be crystal clear that he would be fired if he kept looking at his phone during his training. He did. He was crystal clear. The next day, his third day on the job, he couldn’t help himself. Although it wasn’t continual, he was regularly peaking at his phone during his training sessions. He was fired that day.
Please read that last paragraph again. He was told that he would be fired if he used his phone during training. He couldn’t help himself. He chose to check Instagram or text messages or whatever instead of employment. When he was fired, he was shocked. The addiction was so bad that he wasn’t even aware of his behavior.
Folks, this is an addiction. I know it sounds silly, but phone addiction is serious. The behavior that manifests from this addiction sucks away focus, attention, and listening skills. Even if a salesperson doesn’t bring their phone to a client meeting, they don’t know how to listen any longer than seven seconds because of their addiction.
What can you do? There are dozens of articles that can help you more than I can. The purpose of this blog post is to make sure you understand the magnitude of this problem among salespeople. This is a real problem, and it’s impacting the relationships your salespeople are building or maintaining with their customers … your customers. I don’t know specifically what you can do, but do a little research and do something.
