By Matt Webb, CEO, Mentor Group
For all the issues facing the modern seller, there is perhaps no larger contributor to lost revenue and revenue performance than mental fitness. This, of course, also means that mental fitness is the single largest opportunity to improve revenue and revenue performance, and the biggest catalyst for change.
Let’s look at some critical statistics:
- According to the World Health Organisation, depression and anxiety cost the global economy an estimated $1 trillion annually in lost productivity.
- In the US, mental health disorders are the leading cause of disability, resulting in an estimated $200 billion annually in lost earnings.
- In the UK, mental health issues account for an estimated £35 billion per year in lost productivity, according to the Centre for Mental Health.
- A study by the American Psychiatric Association found that mental health conditions cost US employers an average of $12,500 per employee annually in lost productivity, absenteeism, and healthcare costs.
- According to a study by Harvard Medical School, employees with depression have an average of 5.6 hours of reduced productivity per week, resulting in an estimated $44 billion in lost productivity annually in the US.
Just let those stats sink in. What sort of impact could we have if we shifted those numbers by just a few percentage points, or just a single decimal point?
The benefits of seriously addressing mental health and fostering a culture of strong mental fitness are evident, but we are missing the opportunities to do so because, generally speaking, we simply do not talk about it. It gets pushed under the carpet and ignored. Sure, in recent times we have seen some progress, and in wider society the stigma around mental health is shrinking, but this is not true in selling.
Selling is, and will always be, a high-pressure environment. But sales has been, and must no longer be, a hostile environment. It is full of toxic behaviours and attitudes, which only serves to add unprecedented pressure on sellers who are already consistently under pressure by nature of being a seller. They must hit their targets, but the reward for hitting those targets is simply another, higher target; this cycle is a vicious one, and one that is incredibly hard to break.
As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. Seller teams often meet weekly, if not daily in some organisations, where their performance metrics are heavily scrutinised and publicly and explicitly placed in direct comparison – and therefore competition – with their peers. In a healthy, supportive culture, this is not intrinsically a bad thing, but in a performance culture that only places value on the bottom line, the pressures sellers are made to endure frequently make selling an untenable choice for a long career, let alone a long life. It is no wonder employee turnover in selling is so high.
The solution is mental fitness. Mental health is a lagging indicator of your mental fitness; much like physical health, it is impacted by how well you exercise. By focusing on mental fitness, we focus on something we can change, something we can influence on a daily, if not hourly, basis. In exactly the same way physical exercises impact your physical health, there are mental exercises we can perform that will, over time, impact our mental health.
The even better news is it doesn’t even need to be hard. We just need to do it regularly, and then we can let our amazing physiology do the rest. As an organisation, Mentor Group have been working closely with Positive Intelligence, an organisation at the forefront of the mental fitness movement. Their founder and CEO, Shirzad Chamine is a passionate advocate of the importance and impact mental fitness can have on an individual, and their groundbreaking PQ program has shown just how much a positive change in mental fitness can impact Sales.
Selling is a challenging profession that requires a high degree of mental fitness. Our day-to-day roles involve dealing with rejection, handling objections, and maintaining a positive attitude in the face of adversity. Not easy, but well worth it.
