Think of five salespeople you know. Did you know that at least two of them are likely struggling with their mental health?
Survey research shows that more than 40% struggle with mental health in sales. Yet, we don’t talk about it.
This is due to the competitive nature of the job, as well as some social stigmas around mental health in general. Obviously, ignoring the problem does more harm than good.
Because if we want to provide an exceptional customer experience, we first need to provide an exceptional employee experience. To do this, we need to take the health and well-being of our team members into account.
The Mental Health of Salespeople
At this point, we’ve established that many salespeople are struggling with their mental health. But just how many are and what is their challenge?
First, let’s examine some existing research on mental health and sales.
According to a study conducted by the Insurance Information Institute, around 37% of workers said they had experienced at least one mental health concern.
This study found that the greatest cause of concern was high job stress. However, around 25% of respondents reported that they were not coping well with stress, in part due to feeling responsible for their teams.
Employees who reported mental health concerns were more likely to feel burned out, anxious, and depressed.
How to Support Your Team When They’re Struggling
According to the Harvard Business Review, an impressive 85% of all businesses in the United States reported that it’s very important to provide a good employee experience. It’s the responsibility of management and leadership. Here are a few ways you can do this:
Find Ways to encourage employees to take time off.
Nowadays, people check their work email less frequently and work remotely. Taking advantage of these benefits is the key to retaining good employees and creating a safe work environment.
Salespeople often had to do painstaking manual tasks, like having a track of commissions, quota management, and more. The best thing you can do is to automate these repetitive tasks and free them of the anxiety created in the process. A commission automation tool is a good place to start.
Consequences of Ignoring Mental Health
Research has shown that half of all serious mental illness begins by the age of 14. A whopping 60% begin by the age of 24. As we age, the condition of our brains becomes progressively worse, and our mental health needs become more serious.
Bruised egos and endless crying spells aren’t doing anyone any good, especially if that was you one day ago.
Further, by ignoring the problem, we are only digging a deeper and deeper hole.
The public conversation around mental health is stuck in a loop. Social stigmas and lack of knowledge about the effects of mental illness on health have only made the situation worse.
Why You Need a Mentor or Coach
Maybe you’re new to your position and you feel like you don’t have what it takes to build a strong rapport with your customer. Or maybe you feel like you can’t tell your customer how disappointed you are with their service. Or maybe you feel like you can’t ask for more money and still be a viable candidate for the next promotion.
You’d be able to handle these situations if you’ve the support of a mentor or coach.
Before reaching out to a mentor or coach, here’s how you can ease the process: start with smaller conversations instead of discussing bigger goals.
I never would have had success if I didn’t have support and mentorship from my first boss and my teammates at my first company.
Conclusion
Mental health is not just a medical issue, but an individual one. If we fail to take into account the mental health of our employees, we create a situation in which they feel unsupported, unappreciated, and unproductive. We need to take mental health seriously in our business. And we need to take it seriously in our personal lives as well.
We need to take a good, hard look at what we do to support our employees. How we conduct our employee reviews, how we make sure our team members have the right training, how we praise, mentor, and hold people accountable are all things that go a long way to supporting mental health.
These are the things we can and should do.
