Sales Meetings Are Fun
Over the course of my career I have been in more sales meetings than I can remember. Some have been productive. Many have not been. My current weekly sales meeting is actually very helpful. We talk about some of the struggles and successes we all are facing with different clients and loans and also review current guidelines and programs to keep us all sharp.
When it comes to talking about the struggles we face and the difficulties that come up, many of the conversations turn negative. How easy it is to jump on the negative bandwagon and talk about all the difficult clients and things that are going wrong! I find myself doing this more often than I would like. Why not? Everyone else is being negative. I can easily do that too.
A Real Christian businessman knows that going the negative route in a sales meeting is not the direction to go. Would a better course of action be to keep my mouth closed if I don’t have anything nice to say? (thanks Mom for teaching me that). Or how about giving out encouragement to others that may be experiencing genuine difficulties with a particular client or loan instead of being negative about the whole situation and piling it on?
It’s not easy to go the way that we are expected to go. Today’s world causes us all to have a negative bent! I can attest to this first hand as I am constantly battling this negative tendency.
Take a moment when you find yourself doing this in your next meeting to step back and either not speak (very hard for me!) or speak with encouragement and curiosity (how can I learn from my colleague’s situation so that I can be better at my job?)
“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up…” 1 Thes 5:11a (ESV)