Unintended Consequences
What happens when you pit two women against each other? Unintended consequences.
Being on top of my sales game, leading two major global accounts and several national ones, I was recognized and respected for my achievements. Most importantly I was loving what I did and the high-performing sales team I got to work with, when a not-so-subtle challenge was presented.
There was a new kid on the block. She had joined our sales team about a year earlier and she was leading a major global account that was a direct competitor to mine. Oddly enough, no one on the sales team introduced us. We found ourselves standing in a conference room at our national sales meeting when we first met. This was the first time in our company’s history that two women, who were hired from the ‘outside’, held the top account spots in our division. It didn’t go unnoticed. At that meeting a few of the guys chided us for being competitors and said they couldn’t wait to see how we would beat each other up to get points on the board.
Now you may be thinking those guys were sexist saying they wanted to see two women battle it out. That’s not how I saw it and that’s not how she saw it either so simmer down. We saw it as sales people trying to gaslight each other.
And well, it worked. We took the bait…. just not how they expected us to.
We decided to forgo the competition and focus on trust, integrity and collaboration. It’s not that we weren’t competitive, we totally were. We were constantly looking at our numbers and had a crazy drive to win. It’s that we knew we could be better together.
We both knew that if we could trust and be vulnerable with each other we could learn from each other and grow. Grow as professionals and grow our businesses.
With trust came integrity. Integrity to keep up confidentiality firewalls to do right by our customers. Integrity to hold ourselves accountable and follow through on what we said we were going to do. Most importantly integrity to be true to ourselves and our values rather than get sucked into a pitting game.
Leveraging the foundation of trust and integrity it was easy for us to collaborate, share best practices and pull each other up. Through the spirit of collaboration, we broke the you vs. me sales paradigm and drove what a sales team should truly be about – to win as one while serving our customers. These are lessons we continue to share with our peers, teams and clients.
And well, a funny thing happened along the way. The unintended consequence of pitting two women against each other was that not only did we grow professionally; our customers grew and our company’s sales grew. The next year at the annual sales meeting we both stood on the stage to accept the top salesperson of the year award; our numbers were exactly the same right down to the penny. How’s that for a competition?
#The5Bs #teamwork #collaboration #womeninsales #competition #executivecoach #sales #theleaderslighthouse