While a career in sales can be incredibly rewarding and fulfilling, it can also bring about high levels of stress. Sales can be a demanding profession. To succeed as a sales leader, you must know how to keep your sales reps happy and engaged. Often, this starts with helping them manage stress and keeping harmful stressors at bay.

If you sense the stress creeping in on your sales team, Alex Rynne, a content creator for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, offers some insight for managing this stress. We share her tips in this issue of Promotional Consultant Today.

Show humility and empathy. Create a culture of solidarity and let your team members know that everyone's in it together. Try openly discussing your own personal struggles as this will help build trust and make your employees feel more comfortable approaching you. One of the best ways to help a person who's feeling down is by letting them know they're not alone.

Create clear structure. Ambiguity and confusion can be major causes of stress. When someone on your team doesn't know what to do or whether they're doing the right thing, they may end up feeling lost. Rynne says sales managers can prevent this by defining roles, expectations and processes in ways that everyone understands. Document these details and meet with your people to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Play up the positives. As a sales leader, you have an opportunity to place a strong focus on your team's accomplishments and achievements. Instead of harping on missed opportunities and setbacks, look for ways to celebrate wins in creative ways.

Get people moving. Research shows that exercise—even something so simple as getting up and going for a walk—can help alleviate minor levels of stress and anxiety. Build time into reps' schedules for things like taking a stroll outside or even just experiencing changes of scenery. If employees don't feel like they have enough bandwidth for these kinds of breaks, that may be part of the problem.

Work toward shifting mindsets. One way to combat sales stress is to downplay the prevalent obsession with time management. So often, the perception that we don't have enough hours in the day can instill feelings of dread. As managers, we might seek to avoid this pitfall by instead emphasizing attention management, which is focusing on getting things done for the right reasons, in the right places and at the right moments. It's about prioritizing people and projects that matter instead of fretting about how long tasks will take.

For many who work in sales, stress comes with the territory. However, there's no need to let stress run rampant. If your sales team is feeling overwhelmed or grappling with higher than normal amounts of stress, consider how you can help them feel happy, comfortable and fulfilled. When you take the time to alleviate some stress, you'll likely experience lower turnover and higher productivity.

In addition to implementing the tips above, consider holding open, honest discussions with your sales team about how they feel workplace stress can be diminished.

Source: Alex Rynne manages social strategy for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, bringing the brand voice to life across social and the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog through content designed to inspire marketers to succeed.