Managers have almost always been in the difficult situations their salespeople find themselves in. In this video, Keith Rosen explains how to avoid spoon-feeding your salespeople the answers and how to boost their confidence at the same time.

Excerpt from a live Q & A event in 2012. Facilitated by Keith Rosen.

Complete Video Transcript

You can’t scale dependency. You can’t scale dependency! Five people, to ten, to twenty, to thirty, to fifty? You can’t scale that. You can’t have twenty people coming to you with every single problem.

What you can scale is making your people more self-sufficient. Sharpen their problem-solving skills by giving it back to them so they can experience the feeling of coming up with the solution on their own. Because when people own it, they act on it, rather than being told what to do.

After all, human nature right? We resist what we hear but we believe what we say. And a lot of managers have raised their hands and said, “But Keith, I’m pretty much always right. I’ve heard this. I’ve been there before. I’ve been doing this for ten years, I’ve sold for twenty years. I’ve seen every scenario.”

And I don’t dispute that. What I do challenge that manager on is this, “You may be right. But if you keep giving them the answer, you’ll be spoon-feeding them the answer their whole career. You allow them to come up with the solution on their own? They own it. They own it and you’ve just built their confidence. You’ve raised their confidence level. Guess what? The next time they have a similar challenge, they’re going to handle it themselves.