Stress Management For Sales: Health Risks and Coping Skills

There are plenty of stressful jobs out there but if you’re in sales and believe your profession is uniquely stress inducing, there’s data to back that up. Sales is one of the harder roles especially if you are working on commission.

Why is it so stressful? Dealing with a monthly or quarterly quota adds a lot of pressure; plus, there are many factors in sales that may feel out of your control (it doesn’t matter how effective you’ve prepared for a meeting if the prospect is a no show.)

Your “go to “strategy for dealing with stress may be just ignoring it. Health and safety issues aside, stress is bad for your productivity.  Let’s show you some what happens when you stress:

The Signs of Stress

Stress has many physical effects, none of them good.  Here are some the usual ones;

• Headaches
• Chest pain
• Fatigue
• Trouble sleeping
• Chest pains
• Stomach pain
• Hair loss
• Eyelid twitching
• Acne
• Back pain
• Rashes
• Frequent colds and/or infections
• High blood pressure

These are mostly short-term symptoms, but be aware, maintained stress can change your biological body and can result in stroke, heart disease and even diabetes.

If you’re experiencing multiple symptoms on this list, it’s very possible your anxiety is impacting your body. Don’t let your health go unchecked. Let us share some secrets with you on how we manage stress.

How to Manage Stress at Work

Whether you’re sitting at your desk, in a meeting, or on the phone with a prospect the following information will help you to put in some actionable steps to manage stress. There are no quick fixes, after all, most sales reps can’t drop everything to go take a calming yoga class in the middle of the day, just to destress.

Take a deep breath

When your anxiety spikes, manage it by breathing in for five seconds, holding it for five more and then exhaling for a final five. Slow, deep breaths activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which in turn calms you down. Many people use this technique as it really does work.

Don’t think too much

Worrying about what may or could happen isn’t helpful. Sure, you should prepare for likely eventualities but that doesn’t mean dwelling on scary thoughts without any productive decisions. Rumination is bad for depression or for negative thought patterns.

Give yourself five minutes to think about the problem. After five minutes, decide what your next steps will be. Then act but then move on. This strategy helps people stay productive and avoid dwelling on negative thoughts. Try it next time you’re overwhelmed with anxiety.

Give yourself a break

Do you try to force yourself to feel better?  According to a new study from University of California, Berkeley, pushing away your feelings may not help. You cannot force a feeling. You can help it with positive thoughts and following the advice below:

“We found that people who habitually accept their negative emotions, experience fewer negative emotions, which adds up to better psychological health,” said Iris Mauss, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

After testing more than 1,300 adults, the study authors found that people who let sadness, disappointment, resentment and other bleak emotions “run their course”, are less stressed both in the present and six months down the line.

Exercise

I know, I know… you’ve heard this one before. Yet it bears repeating simply because it’s so effective.

On exercise days, people’s mood greatly improved after exercising. Mood can stay about the same on days they didn’t, except for people’s sense of calm which deteriorated. Not only were the study participants less stressed, but they were also better at managing their time, more focused, energetic and motivated.

Separate research suggests many of the benefits of exercise come in the first 20 minutes. Set aside one fifth of an hour to bike, swim, jog, or lift weights.  That’s feasible for even the busiest salespeople.

Reach out

Interpersonal interactions trigger you to release a whole host of hormones that counteract the ‘flight or flight’ response. You’ll not only lower your stress level, but you’ll be happier in general and your centre of gravity will broaden.

Here are some suggestions for getting support from your network;

• Get lunch with a coworker
• Grab coffee with your mentor
• Join a pick up sports game
• Go to the gym with a friend
• Call a relative
• Maintain a balanced lifestyle

Each of these micro-choices will either make you more resilient or more vulnerable to stress. The former will enable you to do all the things in life you’re passionate about and enjoy. The latter will almost certainly limit you and leave you feeling dull and foggy. With that in mind, do your best to stay balanced.

That means eating healthy food 80% of the time and treating yourself 20%, reducing your caffeine and sugar intake (both of which produce mood and energy crashes), getting enough sleep and not using substances to cope.

Meditate

Meditation sounds like a big commitment. But it doesn’t have to be a long activity or something you learn from an expert.

Try drinking water mindfully, keeping track of the things that make you happy and doing a “body scan” (i.e. mentally scanning down your body, focusing on the sensations in each part).

Take notes

Chances are, your stressors don’t vary too much. Perhaps you’re worried that you won’t meet quota and you’ll be fired, and therefore get stressed each time a ‘sure thing’ deal that was ‘a slam dunk’ fails to come through.

Or maybe you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, so you start to feel worried each time friends, family members or colleagues you talk to ask you what you will be when you grow up.

Notice what tends to stress you out so you can better control your reaction. For a week or two, keep a running list of the times you were stressed and what caused them. Then review it, looking for the usual themes.

If there’s something you can avoid completely, do so. For everything else, take proactive measures to lower your stress.

Set the right expectations

You will never be free of stress. As I discussed, selling is inherently stressful. Yet even if you were in a low pressure job, you’d still be facing stress about finances, relationships, current events and important life changes not to mention all the stress from little issues, like rushing to catch your plane in time or forgetting to do something for a friend.

Stress needs to be approached as an unavoidable part of your life, one that you can modify and manage but will never completely remove it yourself. Use these techniques with the right expectations and slowly work towards managing your stress. You’re not trying to erase stress, you’re simply trying to cope with it.

These techniques aren’t luxuries. If you want to be happy, healthy, and productive, you really can’t do without them. You’re not guilty as a human being to declutter your mind and clean your schedule to avoid burnout and become top producer in sales, you need to have some breathing rooms.