How to Handle Stress and Keep Your Sales Team Closing Deals

Commissions. Quotas. Competition.

There are plenty of stress-triggering factors in a salesperson's daily life. By nature, salespeople are put in situations that create a high-stress environment.

While some of that stress is good, it’s also likely to negatively impact the productivity of your sales team.

We all deal with stress differently, but there are a few techniques that every salesperson can apply to cope with stressful situations, maintain composure, and continue to close deals.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to cope better with stress on a personal level and collectively as a sales team.

Let’s dive in.

Develop Coping Skills

Stress isn’t all bad. After all, the onset of stress helped our ancestors survive. When stress prevents us from thinking straight and hinders our work, it truly becomes a cause for concern.

Here’s what you can do to better equip yourself for stressful situations.

1. Create your Personal Stress Scale

It doesn’t take much for us to get stressed.

If things today look slightly worse than yesterday, our stress levels increase. Stress is an internal phenomenon that we tend to intensify. Often, we see situations as more stressful than they should be.

Stress occurs in three stages: anticipating the situation, when you’re in the situation, and reflecting on the situation.

Applying simple math and logic to your emotions makes it much easier to keep them in check and deal with stress.

Quantify the stress you experience by using a scoring system. Then, score and record the stressful events that you go through over time. This will help you better understand each situation and create more context around that stress.

Here’s what to do to create your stress scale.

1. Make a list of all the situations in which you’ve experienced stress.
2. Please assign a number to each one using a 1–10 scale (1 being low, 10 being high).
3. First, score it based on how stressed you felt while anticipating the situation. Then, score it based on how bad you thought it was while in the situation. Lastly, while looking back at the problem, score it based on how bad it was.
4. Write down the worst possible scenario that could happen. As a founder, this could be running out of money, being unable to make payroll, letting go of employees, etc.
5. Again, compare the situations you’ve experienced to your worst possible scenario and adjust the score if necessary.

Use this simple framework to cope with stressful situations more rationally. By quantifying your stress levels, you can identify whether your emotions are taking over or whether you’re in control.

2. Share Stress with Your Team Members

Actively work towards sharing the stress with other salespeople on the team.

The easiest way to do this is to have a process in place. By process, we mean who’s responsible for what. Because if your roles are clear, you can balance and offload stress between each other whenever the situation calls for it.

Instead of one of you experiencing a stress level of 8 or 9, you’ll find yourselves independently dealing with a 5 or 6. This will leave you in a much more manageable situation that will cause less tension and produce a healthier team dynamic.

3. Take Action to Reduce Stress Levels

The only remedy for high stress levels is taking action. Whether that means approaching or thinking about a problem differently or solving an issue, it doesn’t matter. If you don’t act, your stress levels will remain the same.

Talk to someone about the problem. Ask for advice or help to take control of the situation. Talking to someone who’s gone through what’s currently stressful for you provides instant context to the situation and makes you reevaluate it.

While you might think, “This is the end of the world,” as soon as you talk to someone who’s gone through that same situation, you’ll immediately gain perspective and become more knowledgeable about the situation you’re dealing with.

Perhaps you’ll realize you’ve blown things out of proportion, the problem isn’t as bad as you initially thought, or there’s an immediate resolution to the problem.

How much attention, energy, and effort should I put into this? That’s what it comes down to.

4. Convert Your Stress into Something Positive

Remember, being stressed isn’t all bad. It means you care about the situation, your company, your salespeople, and your customers.

You'll feel stressed and emotionally challenged when something threatens what you care about. It would be strange if you didn’t experience stress in challenging situations.

Whenever you’re in a stressful situation, it’s often difficult to look past it as it demands all of your attention. To cope with stress, you first need to identify the stressor: The event or stimulus that triggered the anxiety.

Here’s an example.

Think about the difference between the feeling of fear and the feeling of excitement. If you remove those labels, the feeling is pretty much the same.

Try telling yourself, “This is exciting. I’m excited.” Verbalize what you’re feeling. By doing so, you’re telling your brain to use those emotions in a way that affects you positively instead of negatively.

The feelings are very similar to each other. It’s the way you think about it that makes the difference. So take that energy and channel it into something good.

Although stress starts as a negative feeling, you can convert it into something positive.

Master Stress Management for a More Productive Sales Team

Learning to deal with stress and difficult situations is an essential skill in the workplace—not only for salespeople but for everyone.

That comes with experience.

You will go through phases when you deal with negative situations and situations that are not easy to fix. During these phases, your stress levels are likely to hit 8s and 9s on your stress scale.

When this happens, don’t just think about it as a challenge. View it as an opportunity to improve your stress management skills because they will keep coming your way as the company develops and grows over time.

Tackling stress, confronting your emotions, and managing them in a high-pressure situation won’t be a comfortable experience. But the better you can deal with stress, the more successful you will be in overcoming those situations.

How do you cope with stress? Please leave a comment below to tell us how you cope with stress.