According to the Daily Mail, the Premiership Football season for 2020/21 revealed something quite extraordinary. The “total wiping out of home advantage”.
Of all the home matches played, 45% were won by the away team, leaving 40% for the home team and the rest draws. The previous season had seen the home team win far more games in their own stadium, with the patriotic fans screaming them along to win.
And that’s the point for all of us in sales, professional advising and sales coaching. We need home fans yelling us along.
The terraces had been emptied of crowds last year due to COVID, and you may, personally, have lost all your fans this year because you spent most of your time at home, in your spare room on Zoom. Even if you are in the office, hardly anyone else is. This situation isn’t going to disappear overnight either; it will continue for many years to come.
So how do you get your home fans back to support you? Here are some ideas:
- All you sales managers out there, make sure you support your salespeople more than you currently are, make your support noisy. Don’t “dashboard” manage; spend some time coaching them.
- Get yourself a mentor. They’re free mostly, or you can pay for a coach if you’re self-employed. Coaches support you.
- Share your work with your loved ones and seek some praise. Men are particularly good at this anyway; women are more modest.
- Support your own partner more.
- Create a “success” diary and make a note of all the successes and wins you have every day. Refer when you need some support.
- Rid yourself of negative thoughts, pining over past mistakes or worrying over the future, which you can’t control, so don’t.
- Zoom call your best work buddy at 9am and keep them live on your second monitor all day. Visually support each other as the day progresses, almost like you’re sitting next to each other in the office.
- Encourage yourself more, find a way of changing your state of mind to more positive states. Use your stairs to do this. Name each step a particular state, so when you climb them to your spare bedroom, read out the states and change them in your mind. Tenacity, perseverance, humility, confidence and my last four steps down to the Studio. Call them what you like or need.
- Put some good tunes on Alexa; music and songs bring back wonderful memories.
Above all, get your home supporters back; it’s been proven we all need them, even namby-pamby overpaid professional footballers who are human, after all
