You're a visionary. You worked hard, paid your dues, and helped build the business – sale by sale, click by click.

It was fun... way back then.

Now you're leading the business, responsible for hiring smart and talented people, setting ambitious goals, and training your employees to succeed.

And you're doing it. Day in, day out, you spend your time working on your business.

Imagine how well it would be doing if you spent your time working in it.

Working "in" a business vs. working "on" a business

No, you don't have to be a road warrior or get yourself a nameplate on a cubicle to work "in" your business. But you do have to be involved in generating or refining the products or services your business sells.

This means that you, as the leader of the sales team, are actually out there selling.

When you are working in your business, you have customers on whom you call. You are directly involved in understanding their businesses, their objectives, and their problems. And then you are directly involved in understanding how your products and services solve their problems.

It's a powerful tool that can help you improve your sales training. When you are working "in" your business, you know with precision what needs to happen to improve your business. As a result, it is actually a great way to work on your business as well.

When you are working "on" your business, on the other hand, you often wind up spending a lot of your time networking, researching, developing sales strategies, refining marketing materials, and debating website development. You are not rolling up your sleeves and doing the (often difficult) day-to-day work that it took to build the business in the first place. And you are often relying on the advice of others. Or you are making educated guesses.

Neither is a good way to build your business from good to great and from great to exceptional.

But wait! There's more!

As if having a first-hand understanding of how to improve your business wasn't enough, there is another clear benefit to working "in" your business rather than working "on" your business: you get to know (really, really know!) your sales staff.

Knowing (really, really knowing!) your sales staff allows you to understand how each member processes information and makes decisions. This then, allows you to build a better sales training program – one that is customized to make the biggest impact with each salesperson.

The idea is to leverage the power of whole brain thinking to communicate more effectively with each one of your sales employees. Whole brain thinking requires you to:

• Acknowledge that people process information differently. Some desire just the logical facts, some need more structured organized details, some are out-of-the-box creative thinkers, and some are more focused on the people involved.
• Discover what role those differences play in how they communicate within the team, whether in speaking or listening.
• Consider, cultivate, and maximize those differences, both internally and through sales training, to move everyone towards a successful common goal.

Whole brain thinking works – but only if you have the knowledge of your employees to put its power to work for you and your company. And that means working "in" your business (at least some of the time) rather than spending all of your time working "on" your business.

Besides, it might actually become fun... again.