Colum Lundt

The old distinction between “field sales” and “inside sales” is an increasingly irrelevant one. Today, the most effective and productive sales teams see themselves as remote sales professionals.

Back in the 1930s, in the wake of the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression, there was a social phenomenon in the United States known as the “Hoover Garden,” sometimes called a “Depression Garden.”

Many of the sales leaders I talk to these days tell me that they are struggling with the issue of keeping the team(s) focused. Of course, this problem, which extends across all industries, comes at a time when many of us are directly or indirectly confronting issues related to the global pandemic, to financial pressures on both the personal and organizational scales, and to questions of social unrest. It's not all that surprising that sales teams are distracted. Everyone is distracted. The question is, what do leaders do about it when that distraction reaches the point where it affects revenue generation?