What goes into building a high quality sales culture
Every sales team has a culture. Good ones are rare, and they take much work to establish and maintain.
And we know how valuable a sales team can be to a company. We also know that having a good sales team can do wonders for the performance and culture of a business.
Without a good sales team culture, you’ll struggle to hit your sales goals. Building and maintaining a high quality sales culture is no easy task, but the results are worth it.
In this blog post, we want to break down what it takes to have a high quality culture for a sales team.
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Over-communicate without micromanaging
Most employees don't like being micromanaged, so as a leader, you need to stop this before it turns into something negative, like poor employee engagement.
Micromanaging boils down to how much a leader communicates to their team. And if the only thing you communicate to your team is how they can meet their quotas, that’s an issue.
My advice to you is to over-communicate rather than under-communicate. Transparency is key when it comes to over-communication. The more aware everybody is, the less they have to guess or ask.
You want your team to be aware of everything going on at work and with their team. If they're feeling micromanaged, they will feel disengaged and not put in the effort.
So, transparency is critical if you want over-communication. The more context given, the less they have to ask.
Create friendly competition with your team
The best part of competing is that we find what we are capable of accomplishing. And it’s a love of competition that inspired many to start their careers in sales in the first place.
Yet many businesses avoid internal competition like it’s the flu.
Competition in the workplace is not a bad thing if done right. Sales leaderboards are a great tool for fostering healthy competition within your team and organization.
By having a sales leaderboard, it allows you to have a big picture of your team's activity, benchmark individual performance against it and compare results within specific time periods.
Additionally, if leaderboards are used to their full potential, everybody can come out as a winner: the sales professionals, customers and the company.
Top sales professionals are regularly driven to outperform their peers. Not out of spite, but because they know the competition is needed for personal, team and organization success.
Sales professionals are competitive by nature, and such tactics like a sales leaderboard, encourages them to excel and work harder.
But you want to have a sales culture where salespeople don't care about being at the top or better.
Thus, motivation and morale are crucial for sales and, having a leaderboard can bring you both, improving overall performance for you, your team and brand.
Struggle together & win together
Let's face it; not every workplace team is great. That's the reality.
But when teams experience highs and lows together, they develop a stronger bond as a whole.
With challenging experiences, like closing a big deal or nailing a big client, sales leaders should be prioritizing their team members for a chance to work together and collaborate.
Team collaboration is the center of any business. They can have an increased level of trust, a more engaged workforce and improved performance.
Discuss tasks and projects everybody is working on as a group. Talk about wins and losses openly. Lend a hand to a colleague if they are struggling with a task. The more you encourage your team to collaborate, the closer they will feel.
Wrapping Up
It’s your duty as a leader to make sure the sales culture is positive and healthy. And I can tell you one thing, toxic sales culture is on its way out the door.
If an individual creates a lot of revenue for the company, they should be rewarded accordingly. If you want them to keep bringing the best customers, give them rewards at various stages of the sales process.
But as a team, you need to reward them together where everybody gets an incentive. This will allow them to perform as an individual, as well as contribute to the overall performance of the team. The two aspects are created for the sales team to succeed individually and collectively, as a whole.
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