How do you create an exceptional sales team?
In my book #TheCulturalSalesLeader, what I’m positioning is how you can transform your sales environment through the power of unleashing the creativity and behaviors of your team, by building culture. “Behaviors create culture that lead to results.” But to my mind, this is phase two of working with any sales team.
Phase one is about getting a thorough understanding of your company’s trajectory through its pipeline, understanding what its winning use cases are, building a defined go-to-market plan, ‘focus & finishing’ on new business, ‘landing & expanding’ key identified customers, and having a communicable vision/plan that you can share with your team, your cross-functional peers, your leadership, which includes an articulation of opportunities and risks and what needs to be true to win.
Once you have those fundamentals, then the element which will build an exceptional team is to focus on your culture. And that begins by finding the leaders within your cohort and working with them so that they are spreading your philosophy, your approach, and your culture.
I describe all of this in the book with tools and templates, but fundamentally, what this is about is then freeing yourself as a leader from being pulled into the trenches and the day-to-day fighting of particular opportunities or challenges with customers or trying to get deals across the line, which is often the temptation for a newly promoted sales leader, and can happen in environments where the product or offering is complex or where the go-to-market has not been defined well at all. Of course you sell, internally and externally, but through asking your team, “what role would you like me to play?”
A good example of this is instilling behaviors as opposed to KPIs or directorial leadership. For example, the topic of escalations. Escalations are inevitable, but instead, ask, “what do you think we should do?” Or, “who in the organization have you spoken to and what are our available options?”
This is not to say that there can be no escalations,but it does confer on others the requirement, the responsibility, to think creatively about their, and by extension, the business. You do this by trusting your people and giving them the tools and the freedom to build their own networks and ability to source solutions, which they can then bring to the table.
The more this becomes an instilled behavior, the freer you are as the sales leader to start to think a little bit further out and to think about, well, what does my three to five year journey actually look like? And what are the investments that I need to transform this business that I was hired to lead or turn around? And this can all become exceptionally powerful, especially if your group has already been through a reset.
People will stay if they are seeing success, are growing, and feel invested in beyond any paycheck or rewards…
#Leadership
#Management
#Sales
