Don’t you just love all those worthless “corporate initiatives” that gets hurled at you at you every day?

Either by email, voice mail or conference call, I would be willing to guess that ”initiatives” of all kinds come at you and your sales reps all the time.

So what do you do in response?

If you follow them all, you risk losing your sales team’s trust as well as risk losing them…

What you need to do is protect them from as much corporate “spam” as possible by selectively filtering which ones you do the bare minimum on and which ones you wholeheartedly support.

Think of yourself as your sales people’s “spam filter” – shielding them from irrelevant corporate spam while making sure they focus their time and attention on SELLING.

For those initiatives you may mark as spam that you feel add little value, do all you can to advocate these initiatives with the bare minimum of effort, while simultaneously meeting the corporate objectives.  Bear in mind that with this approach, many initiatives may never make it to your salespeople because of your filtering.  This is okay, considering your main job after all, is to help them produce superior sales results.  The interesting part of this concept is that when they uncover that you filter initiatives on their behalf, the more indebted to you they become.

To uncover 14 more ways to in debt your reps to you, simply click here

When filtering what reaches them, you send a subtle yet effective message to them that you are doing all you can to create an environment with an unremitting focus on selling. They will realize that you, as their manager, are immune to getting caught up in the multiple programs that satisfy some upper level executives’ ego because of some concept he learned at Harvard Business School.

Nevertheless, if there is a new initiative that could potentially help them to sell more effectively, then become an advocate for that initiative in spades.  By being selective on which programs you fully support, your salespeople will faithfully follow your lead on the important ones, while minimizing the impact from the not-so-important ones.

Be exceedingly discriminating as to which corporate ventures you support, always being mindful of what’s in it for your salespeople.  Your selectivity as to which ones you are standing behind will be noticed.  When the program can potentially help them to either be more successful or make them more money, and you have established a pattern of selectivity in your advocacy for different programs, then when you finally do endorse a program with vigor, your salespeople will fall in line behind you in your advocacy.

Tell me what ways you block spam for your sales reps by posting a response to this post below.

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