How to Nurture a Growth Mindset in Your Sales Team

Sales teams with a growth mindset will be more productive, resilient, and better engaged with their work. Here are some ways you can foster a growth mindset among your team.

Key Takeaways: 

• Understanding sales psychology can help improve motivation, engagement, and productivity. 
• Psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck identified two distinct mindsets: a fixed one and a growth one. 
• People with a fixed mindset believe that their intelligence and talents cannot be changed.
• People with a growth mindset recognize that their intelligence and talents are mutable. 
• Building grit and resilience is part of developing a growth mindset.
• Team building and sales psychology training can help build these characteristics in your team.

A positive mental attitude is an asset in any job, especially in sales. Rejection is a part of the industry, after all, with statistics showing that 57% of sales reps miss their quotas and just 5% of small businesses  meet their yearly goals. 

A better understanding of sales psychology can help founders – and their sales teams – boost motivation, engagement, and productivity. This article will go over what you need to know to help foster a growth mindset and improve your team’s operations.

Growth mindset vs. fixed mindset

The terms “growth mindset” and “fixed mindset” were coined by Dr. Carol Dweck, a Stanford University psychologist. After decades of research on behavior, she identified that people have one of these two distinct mindsets regarding success and accomplishment. Here are some things to know about them:

• A fixed mindset is “believing your qualities are carved in stone.” 
• A growth mindset is “the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.” 
• Mindset falls along a continuum, and can vary depending on subject matter. 
• With a fixed mindset, “people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success – without effort.”

It’s possible for someone to have a growth mindset in some aspects of their life and a fixed mindset in others. A person may believe they’re “bad with investing,” for example, when they just need to learn more about it and develop skills. The good news is that recognizing they can grow makes the difference.

Characteristics of a growth mindset

Someone with a growth mindset knows failure is inevitable. They learn how to fail, take failure as feedback, learn from it, and course correct. A person with a fixed mindset may not define failure in the same ways. To them, it may be a limitation they can’t or won’t recover from.

Here are some common characteristics found in people with a growth mindset:

• They are persistent despite setbacks.
• They use criticism constructively.
• They learn lessons from the experiences of others.
• They look forward to challenges.

Cultivating a growth mindset requires work, but doing so is worth it. It can help your sales team be more motivated, engaged, and productive. 

How to build grit and resilience for a growth mindset

Psychologists define resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress.” Having a positive attitude isn’t enough. Your team also needs resilience and grit to bounce back when faced with rejection and failure. 

Make changes to your processes

Here are some ways to build grit, resilience, and a growth mindset in your sales team:

• Conduct post-project check-ins so the team can learn from failures and successes 
• Share insights about what could have been done differently to achieve different outcomes
• Do activities such as escape rooms, rope courses, or brain busters that require team effort
• Make time for questions 
• Allow people to make mistakes so they can learn from them 
• Hold regular meetings where you ask the team what they learned this week
• Focus on encouraging efforts, not just results

A sales team that is resilient and has a growth mindset will contribute to your business being resilient and a company culture where a growth mindset is the standard. 

Acknowledge the process 

Most founders understand that they should reward the behaviors they want to see more of. Dweck’s research found it takes more than praising and rewarding results to cultivate a growth mindset, however. Acknowledging the learning process and appreciating efforts – not just results – is critical to encouraging the development of a growth mindset. 

Invest in development and training

Sales psychology is important for anyone in sales, but few salespeople receive adequate sales-specific training. Your employees want to learn. A survey of more than 2,000 employees found organizations that offer professional development opportunities increase employee engagement by 15%. They also saw a 34% higher retention rate compared to businesses that do not. 

Get help building out your sales team

At MetaGrowth Ventures, we help you hit your growth goals by handling sales team hiring, training, and monitoring for you. If you’re in need of new sales professionals to get your company’s products out to the world, we help you find them. We support you in building a high-performing sales team with our rigorous five-step hiring process. We know that hiring is time-consuming, so we help you get it right.

Or, maybe you’re looking to automate your training process. We put our decades of experience to work for you with our solutions-based sales consulting. We memorialize your training and create a digital library of content that can be accessed by your team on demand. We also train your team, including invaluable training in sales psychology and fostering a growth mindset. 

If you’re ready to have an amazing team of top-performing sales professionals do your selling for you, contact MetaGrowth Ventures today.