My wife is a pre-school teacher and is always taking classes and reading articles on early childhood development to keep up with current ideas in her field. She recently shared with me an interesting article on discipline strategies for toddlers and I was struck by how easy it is to apply the same principles to sales management.

During coaching calls over the past week I had three separate conversations with sales managers who expressed frustration with their sales teams. Their concerns were not unusual - a lack of motivation, poor follow through, not hitting agreed upon calling targets, not complying with company policies, a perception that some sales people are just doing the minimum to get by, etc. What struck me is all three sales managers were focused on the negative. They were focused on what was NOT happening rather than what was being accomplished.

For example, one of the sales managers we work with has set a goal for her sales team of scheduling 12 new prospect appointments per week. It's a big goal for this team considering they never measured that metric before they started working with us. For the third week in a row, nobody is hitting this new goal. But they've been improving every week and I'm convinced they will all get to this level of production within the next month (at which point we'll shift the focus to measure the positive outcomes from these initial prospect meetings). But my client isn't seeing the obvious progress toward this goal and is instead focused on the negative.

"Bill, my best sales person, only scheduled eight new appointments this week," she said. "This isn't working!"

When I asked her when was the last time Bill had scheduled eight (8) new appointments in a week, she said she was not sure that he ever had. "Isn't that great?" I asked. I then encouraged her to make a big deal out of it during their next accountability call and to focus on the steady progress the team is making toward the goal. Focus on the 8 appointments that he set rather than the 4 that were not set.

Many parents and pre-school teachers already know this approach. If you want a 4-year old to color in the lines, compliment the areas where they did that rather than focus on the areas where they didn't. "I like how you stayed in the lines on the balloons. That's really pretty!" rather than "What happened? I told you to stay in the lines! You're terrible at coloring!"

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? You would never say that to a child. And yet we see sales managers do basically the same thing when they focus on the negative.

Instead, focus your attention on catching your sales people's successes instead of their stumbles. Compliment their positive behaviors, and small victories, rather than the negatives. Find the bright spots and your sales team will continue to improve. Why not make a conscious effort to find something positive for each sales person this week and praise them for it?