Your salespeople are stressed. This simple fix can make all the difference

In recent years, businesses have made promises to address the scourge of workplace stress. Unfortunately, in the big picture, those efforts don’t yet seem to be making much of a difference.

Work stress remains at a record high, Gallup reported earlier this year. The Voice of the Workplace Report from Calm had similar findings, with 69% of employees in a range of industries saying their mental health has either stayed the same or worsened over the previous year.

More recently, the American Psychological Association had a breakdown showing where things are particularly bad. Thirty percent of people who deal directly with customers, clients, or patients report having fair or poor mental health, compared to 20% of others.

This came as no surprise to me. In my work at A Sales Growth Company, I travel the country training teams for multimillion-dollar businesses. Sales is consistently ranked as one of the most stressful professions, so I ask these professionals what’s damaging their mental health at work the most. They list the fears of not making quotas; the frustration of reaching out to so many leads and getting so few results; the letdown from potential customers who bail at the last minute, and other parts of the daily grind.

Reframing the work

I encourage people to rethink what their job is. “Your job isn’t to sell—it’s to help people,” I explain. If you think of your objective as being the sale, then rejection is painful and taxing. But if you think that your job is to offer people help, then in the end if they don’t accept the goods or services you’re offering, it’s their loss. I refer to this as a “noble perspective,” and to the methodology as “gap selling”—focusing on the difference between where customers or clients are currently and the future state they seek.

To make this mental shift work, there’s something people need from their organizations. They need to know the stories of people who have been helped by their work. They need reminders of the real-world difference they make. Some businesses have implemented practices in which they share recent positive and negative customer feedback at meetings. But that isn’t enough.

Why spontaneity matters

When employees know to expect a report from managers or executives that includes some feedback, it becomes perfunctory, and generally not very meaningful. Instead, organizations should provide individual employees with positive customer feedback and success stories at random times, whenever those come in. They should appear in emails and chat messages, be brought up at group meetings and company-wide events, and more.

A study from Finland explored this. Researchers dug into which types of feedback affect workers’ well-being. Interviewees said they experience a “sense of achievement fairly seldom,” which damages their mental health. When they do get that needed sense of achievement, the biggest source is feedback from customers (followed by managers and colleagues). “The interviewees felt that they receive too little spontaneous feedback,” the study found. All too often, managers provide feedback at meetings, which “eliminates the spontaneity.”

Spontaneous feedback should come often. As one person in the study put it, in “a totally normal week . . . you don’t get any particular feeling of success or anything like that. You just do your job and that’s it.” Another said it’s only “once in a while” that you hear “you have done something which makes the customer really happy.”

Organizations collect feedback in numerous ways. Sometimes, a customer clicks a button at the end of a chat session or fills out a review on Amazon. Businesses should share the positive results internally as often as possible. It’s a little step that can make a big difference.

Improving Peak Experience

Similar tactics work in other fields as well. A study at a social services organization found that “employees alter their understanding of workplace challenges” including emotional distress and “find new meaning in the other-oriented value of their work.”

Ultimately, delivering positive spontaneous feedback can have widespread effects across the organization. When researchers went looking for the biggest causes of “employees’ peak experience” (EPE), they found, “Among those events that can trigger EPE, the highest proportion is (being) recognized by others.” That recognition comes from customers (“e.g. “customers praise an employee’s professionalism”) followed by leaders providing their own recognition. Businesses reported that recognition from customers in particular “can make employees more serious and proactive in their work.”

I’ve seen the power of this. When businesses make sure to pass along positive feedback spontaneously, workers feel regular bursts of enthusiasm. It becomes a part of their work lives. They’re reminded of the “noble perspective.” And they feel more relaxed, knowing that they’re doing all they can to bring help to as many people as possible.