Managing people is one of the most challenging (and rewarding) roles a manager takes on. As a manager of face to face marketers (canvassers & show and event promoters) you rely on many of the same skills as any other manager, but you require another set of skills other managers don’t. You’re not managing people who are sitting behind a desk in a cubical doing the same things over every day, even those in a customer service capacity.
You’re managing people you have to motivate, inspire, equip and hold accountable to approaching prospects who aren’t looking for what you’re selling. Your people have to extract personal information, set up appointments and even sell your products and services they weren’t thinking about before your team member showed up in front of the prospect.
Most view what we do as managers as an impossible job, but I wouldn’t want to be any other kind of manager and miss the fun of developing a team and equipping them with the life-skills they’ll carry with them the rest of their life. To me it’s a badge of honor and I have a swagger in my walk when I’m in the neighborhoods training canvassers, or manning a table in front of a show and event.
So what is your most important skillset as a manager? To motivate your people toward the mission of prospecting for qualified leads.
The leading question I get from managers is, “How do I motivate people?”
Motivation is not about having a great motivational, ‘rah-rah’ speech; it’s not about being someone you’re not. Those things don’t work over the long-term. The reality is that you can’t really motivate a person, but you can equip and inspire them. Motivation happens within the individual when they’re inspired.
I’m a football fan, especially of my alma-mater The Ohio State University Buckeyes. Coming out of last season’s championship win the Buck’s coach, Urban Meyer, has probably the best momentum entering the season and a team full of talented football players, yet he, as their coach, has to inspire them every day toward what they can and will achieve. Each week he has to find a way to inspire them. If he’s effective each player will find the motivation within themselves to perform at a high level. The sports analogy is easy to understand, but it’s not any different from what you do every day with your marketing team.
In this article I’ll give you the tools to motivate your teams. Though there are clear steps to follow in managing, the situations and circumstances under which you would apply these will differ from person to person and even day to day.
The Head Trash
This is the most destructive component in motivating people and often it starts within us. Ask yourself, do you have negative ideas and opinions in your head? If you do, how can you lead others in a positive direction when your own mental state is messed up? You have to get your head straight before you can lead others.
Beyond our own head trash, we have to be aware of everyone else’s head trash, especially how it relates to the work we do. When you first took the job as a canvasser or event marketer who were the first people you told about taking the position and what were their reactions? I find those reactions are often negative because I ask people I train and they tell me friends and family members are quick to tell them they made a bad decision and that the job’s going to be hard.
You have to deal with all head trash immediately, swiftly and ongoing. There’s nothing more important than to protect your mindset, but more importantly the people you’re responsible for and accountable to. You took on the role as a manager to be responsible for their state of mind. You can teach all the tools and techniques to perform the job, but if they’re not thinking right their performance will never be what it should be. Think about new people who jump into the job and perform well because they don’t know they can’t. Why did they perform better? Because they didn’t know any different; they didn’t have negative influences. Your #1 responsibility is to protect your people’s mindset.
Self Image
85% of a person’s self-thoughts are negative. A way to spot head trash is to look at how a person views themselves and the world around them. If their self-talk is negative then they’ve got head trash working against them. If they have a negative view about what’s going on around them, then head trash. The world around them doesn’t mean the ‘world’ as a whole; I mean the things that have direct effect and impact on them; their spouse, friends, kids, the community, etc.
Motivating a person is more about changing their self image than it is about teaching them a tangible skill. Self image is something that’s developed from experiences. You can’t fix self image with a better introduction script, you do it by getting them to experience the result of that new script.
When I conduct trainings, I tell the people I teach there are 3 things they’ll learn: skillset, mindset and getting off their assets. The skillset is the scripts, the body language, voice inflection and the tools they use in a presentation. The mindset is having a complete understanding of your purpose and meaning of why you do what you do. And getting off their assets is applying the skillsets they’ve learned and applying them with the mindsets they’ve been taught. Bring these three together and you have the foundation of a powerful training.
The same 3 principles can be applied to helping a person change their self image:
- Teach them how to be successful.
- Help them understand what their true desires are.
- Let them take action.
I set a lot of the groundwork for getting a marketer’s mindset correct at their first meeting, at the recruiting meeting. In the meeting I discuss things rarely discussed in the recruiting meeting. Most recruiting meetings focus on selling the job, but in my job interviews I’m selling 3 ‘Higher Concepts’.
- The uniqueness of how a marketer is compensated. The clear and identifiable path for a marketer to increase their income.
- Show them the system for being able to progress through the ranks in your company or lateral moves into different departments to allow them to develop. All based on performance without any politics, seniority or popularity contest.
- The skills they’ll learn are life-skills; tools they’ll be able to apply in any job or position they’ll take no matter what vocation they ultimately follow. The skillset will separate them from any of their peers.
This will give you the groundwork for becoming a better leader and/or manager. I can’t cover all the details of working with your team in this text. You can hear more in detail on the live Silver Telecoaching call from September 23rd, which can be found in the archives if you’re a Silver level member or higher.
If you have specific questions regarding this month’s subject you can submit your questions directly to me at www.AskTheCanvassKing.com or email me at cthompson@canvassking.com.
My final thought for you this month on the subject of changing your people’s mindset is that there is no one hard-and-fast rule. At the start I said the #1 skillset for a manager is to motivate, the second is to be a great observer and listener. I can give you the tools to be a better manager, but it will require you to watch and listen for the signals every marketer will give you that indicates how and where you can help them.
Now, get off your assets and go be a great leader!
Committed to your canvassing success,
Chris Thompson, The Canvass King