How does pressure impact your selling squad’s performance?

Imagine that you sell for a technology company and that you’ve decided to bring Amy, a solutions architect, to an important sales meeting. Amy is confident and one of the best you have worked with; she is highly experienced and holds an advanced degree from a prestigious university. However, she has primarily focused on working with existing customers through thorny technical configurations and has had limited experience in sales meetings and presentations. In fact, Amy has never received any formal presentation training. That presents a challenge for her as demands from clients and your own organization have changed in recent years. Customer decision makers want to meet “the talent” directly so they can get a better assessment of the resources available from your company. To respond to this demand, your company is stressing the importance of including technical professionals in sales meetings. This is now a component of Amy’s performance goals. So, she has been asked to participate in recent business meetings. But for some reason, Amy tends to freeze up in sales meetings and seems to generate very little client engagement. When she has asked sales reps for feedback, what she gets is general: “You did a great job; thanks for making the time.”

High-pressure situations, such as a presentation or an important client meeting, tend to cause people to underperform. Group people together during a high-pressure situation, and those feelings escalate. Why?

What Is a High-Pressure Moment?

Hendrie Weisinger and J. P. Pawliw-Fry, in their book Performing Under Pressure, share their findings from research they have done with more than 12,000 participants over the course of a decade, drawing from their consulting work with performers in a variety of fields, such as selling teams and elite athletes. (Weisinger & Pawliw-Fry, 2015)

They assign three characteristics to a high-pressure situation:

1.   The outcome is important to you.

2.   The outcome is uncertain.

3.   You feel you are responsible for, and are being judged on, the outcome. (Weisinger & Pawliw-Fry, 2015, p. 46)

Sound familiar?

Anyone who has pitched a project or participated in a critical meeting can agree that the outcome does matter but can be uncertain. We are also likely to feel judged by the audience we are presenting to. Adding speakers to that same presentation triggers an added level of pressure. As social creatures, we crave acceptance by our tribe. So, when we are faced with the prospect of failure, our fears of abandonment are also triggered. We fear losing the protection of the tribe if we don’t perform when others are depending on us. This can happen even if you’re an experienced presenter, a veteran salesperson, or the team leader for an important sales meeting. It’s important to be aware that such moments will affect your behavior as well. How so?

You will recall that the first characteristic of a high-pressure moment is whether the outcome is important to you. If you’re the lead, no doubt winning matters. In fact, if you’re the lead, you may be only member of your selling squad whose compensation—incentive, commission, etc. —may be directly or indirectly tied to the outcome, making it matter even more to you than to your colleagues. Duke University economics professor Daniel Ariely researched this in a study that included participants from India, MIT, and the University of Chicago, and measured the impact of success incentives on performance across several games. The researchers found that in eight out of nine of the problem-solving tasks, “higher incentives led to worse performance.” (Ariely, et al., 2005, p. 19) This means the higher the incentive you or your teammates feel to perform, the more likely individual and team performance will be affected. Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry call this “an incentive trap.” (Weisinger & Pawliw-Fry, 2015, p. 86) Rewards can trigger a primal need to win that award, because of a subconscious belief that your survival may depend on it. That heightened need for the incentive may lead to lying, cheating, and deception, none of which will help you align with your team or your customer.

The second characteristic of a high-pressure moment is that the outcome is uncertain. Even if the client hands you a gem like “the business is yours to lose,” for most sales meetings it’s impossible to argue that a win is a 100 percent certainty. Will you feel responsible for and judged by the outcome? If your answer is yes, you are likely to view the situation as a high-pressure moment. Based on my experience, most salespeople—even the most accomplished among us—feel a personal burden to perform. Or conversely, to not blow it.

What’s the Impact on a Selling Squad?

So, how does pressure impact a selling squad’s performance? Let’s say that you’ve successfully recruited colleagues that are well suited to the task, and that you have created the conditions that allow this group to become an effective team (both topics that we will cover in Part II). Together, you’ve committed the time to prepare for the pitch and the outcome is equally important to all of you. Yet, you share a looming sense of uncertainty about the result. And the tighter the group, the greater your feelings of responsibility are likely to be to one another. As Daniel James Brown describes in The Boys in the Boat, the eight students who comprised the University of Washington men’s rowing team and the 1936 USA Olympic men’s rowing team cared for each other to such a degree that they were all willing to endure physical and mental stress well beyond their individual limits to ensure that they were not the teammate who misses a stroke that might destroy the team’s success. (Brown, 2013)

In a sales meeting, the client is judging you and your unit to determine whether you’re the ones who can help his or her company. To differing degrees, individual team members may feel judged by their peers. After all, the outcome of the pitch can impact your professional brand and your ability to recruit that person again for future selling squads. Your success or failure may impact the way your peers view you and the way your sales manager evaluates your performance and decides your compensation, territory, and resources.

Sales pitches and important customer meetings meet all the criteria for a high-pressure moment. The pressure is felt by each individual in the group and is heightened because others are involved. People who are charged with representing their organization in an important client meeting tend to be confident and accomplished, among that organization’s best, and accustomed to dealing with pressure.

Here’s how high-pressure situations impact performance:

   Thinking becomes rigid: Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry, in their research, found that people in high-pressure situations become “mentally rigid.” (Weisinger & Pawliw-Fry, 2015, p. 66) Imagine a basketball game with two seconds on the clock and your team down by one point. You’ve been fouled and go to the free-throw line. You have one shot to tie the score and send the game into overtime where your team’s chances to win remain alive. If you miss, your team loses. Though you have shot thousands of free throws in your life, the basket now looks like it’s a mile away and the size of a thimble. Mental dexterity, or being lucid, alert, and able to adapt, is key to a successful sales meeting. Consider how tough it is to get a selling squad so coordinated that they adapt seamlessly to comments from client stakeholders and fellow colleagues in the flow of the dialogue. Now imagine a group where the members are mentally locked. They lose their ability to be creative and flexible in the moment.

   People get defensive: Under pressure, people usually become more defensive and less receptive to feedback. An effective team encourages a feedback loop, which allows the unit and its members to make adjustments and improve outcomes. Feedback can occur both before and during customer meetings. Before a sales meeting, the selling squad gets together to prepare and share feedback with one another. Ignoring that feedback hinders your chances of fine-tuning and strengthening your contributions for the customer meeting. During the actual meeting, stakeholders will provide feedback. If the team is unable to receive and incorporate that feedback, they blow by opportunities to course-correct in the moment.

   Teams enter the “performance pressure paradox”: In Heidi Gardner’s Harvard Business Review article, “Coming Through When It Matters Most,” she talks about the “performance pressure paradox” she found in her research on teams within professional services firms. (Gardner, HBR, 2012, p. 83) In high-pressure situations, such as a client meeting, teams need to collaborate to deliver and describe a solution that feels uniquely tailored to the client. Yet, here’s the paradox she discovered:

•   Teams tend to revert to what’s been done before (generic, not customized).

•   Teams tend to drive toward consensus (rather than to the best outcome for the client).

•   Teams tend to yield to those on the team who hold authority in their organization (versus those who know the client best). (Gardner, HBR, 2012, p. 87)

Robotic, defensive, risk-avoidant. These characteristics paint a pretty grim picture of groups crumbling under the pressure of an important moment.

Yet all kinds of teams, including selling squads, successfully hold it together rather than crumble during high-pressure situations and perform close to or at their best when it counts.

Rising to the High-Pressure Moment

Think about selling squads that you have led or contributed to during a high-pressure moment. What did the team do to perform well under those conditions? As a leader, here are some actions you can take to enable your team to perform at its best during the high pressure of an important customer meeting or new business pitch:

1.   Acknowledge the pressure: Sharing your feelings of anxiety with others puts those feelings in a place where others can help, and keeps you connected as a group.

2.   Prioritize client knowledge: Harvard professor Heidi Gardner suggests including team members with knowledge about the client. (Gardner, HBR, 2012, p. 87) Be sure to give extra weight to input from team members who possess customer knowledge over those who don’t; even if there are team members with greater seniority in your organization. What seems like a risky career move may be the decision that wins the business.

3.   Choose words carefully: Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry suggest using words like “want to” over “need to.” (Weisinger & Pawliw-Fry, 2015, p. 117) For example: “We need to stick to the timing we planned” unnecessarily hikes up the pressure, versus the softer “We want to stick to the timing we planned.” Remember that building confidence is one of the key qualities of an effective team leader. I remember pursuing a financing deal early in my career. One day, the company’s CEO strolled by my desk, told me, “the more I think about it, Michael, this deal is a must-win situation,” patted my back, and then disappeared as a quickly as he appeared. Gulp.

4.   Choose an excellence mindset: Team leaders should orient themselves around an excellence or mastery, rather than a ranking or relative, mindset. An excellent mindset means that the focus of your preparation should be geared toward being excellent—your team’s best. Focusing on your performance versus a competitor creates a ranking mindset, and limits your team’s performance because it’s now attached to someone else’s. The relative strength of another team is beyond your control. John Wooden, Hall of Fame basketball coach, won 10 NCAA men’s basketball championships at UCLA. Seven of those championships were consecutive. The roster of players rotated over that time, and it’s amazing to think about how these championships were won by a different group of undergraduates each year. Here is how Coach Wooden defined success in his book Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success: “Success is peace of mind that is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” (Wooden & Carty, 2005, p. 17) Instead of getting distracted by the presence and pressure of competitors, short time frames, and a changing cast of colleagues, enable team members to simply focus on being the best they are able to be as a unit. This subtle adjustment can be a powerful one.

5.   Practice together: Yes, this means rehearsing. While you are probably not performing a concerto during your finals presentation (are you?), the principle of “practice makes perfect” still applies to a sales pitch or important customer meeting. Without practice, what’s your likelihood of operating as an in-sync selling squad at go-time? Practice means many things, including testing your approach and comments with stand-ins who are willing to role-play the client, video playback, and/or coaching and extended team feedback. Rehearsing together reduces the feelings of self-consciousness that often occur when presenting in front of others for the first time. There is a big difference between writing down and thinking about the words you will say, versus saying them in front of others. That feedback flow will allow the team to refine its pitch prior to the moment it counts the most.

We will talk more about how to conduct an effective practice session in Chapter 9.

It is ironic that the pressure of an important meeting or pitch is what creates the need for people to come together as a selling squad. Because it is this same pressure that can hurt individual performance and cause group effectiveness to fray. Carefully structuring your interactions and communications enables your team to respond to high-pressure situations, including a sales pitch or client meeting, effectively and collectively.