Are you enthusiastic?

In sales and customer service - two attributes that make people successful are: being genuine and enthusiastic. If you are genuinely enthusiastic the rest of the sales and customer service skills can be trained. If you are around sales/customer service people often you begin to develop an antenna for these types of individuals…

I love talking with genuinely enthusiastic people and that is all I would hire if I had my choice. But what we often find is there never seems to be an overabundance of enthusiasm in the workplace. Why is that? I have a couple of theories.

I believe we have a gap is in leadership. Too often companies don’t put enough value on creating an energetic environment for the employees. We focus on numbers, performance, and competence as the driving factors for promotion, and those are critical attributes to have. But when you are in the environment of a call center, sales environment, and manage high stress customer service organizations with aggressive retention goals, enthusiastic leaders are an edge to your organization.

Enthusiastic leaders are contagious and the enthusiasm translates into a better environment for agents and improved performance for the organization. The best way to train enthusiasm is to have a leader that lives it every day, even in the most stressful circumstances.

Example: A front line leader at an organization I have had the pleasure to work with encompasses genuine enthusiasm for his job and life. His team lead in all performance metrics in 2014 and has maintained that edge so far in 2015. Evaluating his skill set I concluded the only difference he brought to the table that differentiated his abilities against his peers was enthusiasm. He was contagious! And after listening to his team meetings I wanted to get on the phone and start selling for him!

You may think this is anecdotal and it is - but I challenge you to raise your antenna for enthusiastic people in your daily life. When you come across them take a moment and find out a little more about them. Engage them with a question or two. One of the things I believe you will learn is that they excel at what they do. Guaranteed!

Have a great day everyone!