Cultivating successful teams with a growth mindset
“We don’t need farmers. We need hunters.”
The surface meaning of that everyday comment is unmistakable: we need a seller who’s proactive in finding deals instead of someone who takes their time to try and nurture one from an existing customer, channel partner, or bald hope. But today’s successful salesperson is actually a combination of the best of both sides. They’re not afraid to proactively prospect, but they believe in cultivating relationships because they understand that business has always been a human endeavor.
Because every sales org will have a few all-stars and a few who aren’t a great fit, a top-performing team must be developed from the middle up. Training and coaching are excellent ways to sharpen the craft of sales, but in order for those lessons to take hold, your sellers need to be open to growth. That mentality, like the craft itself, has to be fostered by leaders.
Modern sales approaches often speak to the need for empathetic selling, leadership vulnerability, and the power of human connection. Growth mindset coaching is an extension of all of those principles.
The secret to getting the most out of your team is understanding what motivates them and what is holding them back. Leaders with that knowledge can provide personalized coaching that helps every seller reach their potential and drives revenue growth for their organization.
Why a growth mindset starts with leaders
Leaders without a growth mindset are limited in how they can coach it in others. Studies have even suggested that the opposite, a fixed mindset, can have an unnecessary and detrimental impact on the performance of those that report to them.
Gartner concluded that leaders stuck in fixed ways of thinking subconsciously project this onto their teams in ways that affect business results. Such a leader will unconsciously categorize some employees as high performers and others as low or average. This “harms employee output and success.”
As Gartner’s VP Analyst Elise Olding puts it, “Leaders need to recognize that grappling with thorny challenges is a good thing.” Employees should be encouraged to push beyond their comfort zone rather than be held back by managers thinking they’re incapable of more than they currently do.
Research into the business impact of organizations built on growth mindset principles shows compelling results. McKinsey found that companies able to adopt a growth mindset are 2.4x more likely to outperform than those that don’t.
In competitive markets and industries—and in today’s economic climate—company growth is not a given. Leaders need to invest in the growth mindset because it contributes to innovation, which helps carve out a competitive edge. The company benefits when employees are supported to try things out that may fail in the name of growth, progress, and learning.
Developing a growth mindset coaching framework
Numentum’s work with hundreds of leading revenue organizations has revealed key behaviors in the leaders that successfully coach growth mindset thinking in their teams. These three steps are critical on the journey:
1. Get to know your people
Leaders need to start by establishing a foundational layer of trust and understanding with their team. Growth mindset coaching works best when it is as relevant as possible to the person being coached, which makes getting to know each team member an important initial step.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to shifting a person’s mindset from fixed to growth because everyone is different. In order to find out what’s holding each team member back, leaders need to know at a deeper level their motivations and fears.
Numentum recommends a two-sided strategy for building this trust: big-picture storytelling and active listening. These activities are best suited to a 1-to-1 setting, rather than a team meeting or group workshop, as this best facilitates candid conversation.
For storytelling, leaders should share their journey from a fixed to a growth mindset. Root the story firmly in personal lived experience—the good, the bad, and the ugly—as this will appeal to sellers on an emotional level and be more persuasive than statistics on how effective a growth mindset can be. This quantitative evidence is important, but the emotional hook should come first.
When leaders share their own story, they show vulnerability, which can help build team-wide empathy. It’s also a fundamental baseline for sellers to open up about their own experiences and limitations.
The second part of the coaching focuses on active listening. Leaders should ask about:
What areas of life have they already shown a growth mindset approach?
What fears hold them back from trying new things?
What do they spend time and money on outside of work?
What career and life goals do they have?
What do they want to have in their life but don’t right now?
Active listening is defined by the Center for Creative Leadership as paying attention to the speaker’s behavior and body language to better understand their meaning and signaling your engagement with visual cues like nodding and eye contact.
With key takeaways from this conversation, leaders can provide personalized growth mindset coaching experiences to which each individual will respond positively.
2. Bring benefits to life in a personalized way
Once a leader understands their team's dreams, motivations, and fears, they can start to build a picture of what success looks like for each person. What future version of themselves could be unlocked with a growth mindset? It’s important to construct an image that feels personal and desirable.
For example, finding out about your team’s hobbies reveals valuable motivators. For someone who loves mountain biking or skiing, a leader can describe a future where more commission unlocks more time and money to spend on these valuable activities.
Similarly, if a parent wants to put their children through private school, leaders can help them envisage the impact of adopting a growth mindset. It can be as simple as saying, “This is a way to put the career accelerators on for a couple of years to feel comfortable financially to make the switch.”
Rather than money being an end unto itself, leaders should position it as something that unlocks that individual's next dream or ambition. When a growth mindset is seen through the lens of a desired outcome, sellers are more likely to step out of their comfort zone and try to change.
3. Apply growth mindset thinking to real-life scenarios
The most effective way to coach growth mindset thinking is by applying it to something the individual is working on.
Prospecting provides a wealth of coaching opportunities. A seller with a fixed mindset will continue to prospect in the same way regardless of its effectiveness. In today’s climate of remote selling and economic uncertainty, this is a risky strategy that can lead to diminishing returns.
Leaders should help their team reframe their activities. If a classic cold call isn’t working, what are other ways to approach the prospect? How can the seller’s network be leveraged to facilitate a warmer introduction?
The importance of ongoing practice
Adopting a growth mindset and changing how a person sells won’t always be effective. It’s important to recognize and reward the changes that people make, even if they don’t produce the expected results—especially at the beginning. Celebrate mini wins that come as a result of changing a selling process and share progress across the team to cultivate shared earning opportunities.
Crucially, when a seller does succeed in applying a growth mindset, it should be a moment of reflection. What led to the change, and how did it make them feel? Taking the time to note down emotional effects will help sellers recognize when they’re making similarly growth-oriented decisions in the future.
These three steps to growth mindset coaching are incomplete without a fourth: rinse and repeat. Adopting a growth mindset is a change that requires ongoing practice. When busy times like quarter end approach, it can be easy to slip back into familiar ways of doing things. But these are often also the times when innovative thinking is most needed. Leaders must use the trust they've built with teams to offer reminders of why they’re making the change and nudge them towards decisions that embody the growth mindset.
Revenue Forward
Numentum is a B2B enterprise sales training company that integrates social selling into existing sales processes to engage today’s hyper-informed buyers. Our programmatic approach maximizes the utility of brand, marketing assets, and sales technology to generate predictable pipeline and revenue. We partner with forward-thinking brands to bring focus, routine, and accountability to their sales teams. Our customers include SAP, Workday, Vodafone Business, Verizon Business, Broadcom, and RELX.
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