Sales are at the core of any business growth. However, many companies do not put much effort into laying the backbone for their sales team to thrive. One of the important factors that any company should establish is the sales culture at the beginning stages of setting up a business.
Why It’s Important to Improve Sales Culture?
Sales culture represents your sales team’s personality, the norms and the behavior that your team maintains for successful sales of products and services, and the revenue-generating operations. The sales culture of your company will influence the employees’ motivation and how they communicate and engage with each other.
However, despite the importance of a sales culture, many managers still struggle to establish habits and norms that will build and train the sales team to be more productive and result-oriented. Here are some tips that will improve the sales culture of your company or business.
Culture Fit Employees
The hiring process may make or break the company. Choosing the right people who will fit the company’s culture is the core of any team’s business success. Unfortunately, most hiring managers look for CVs with educational accomplishments and experience or skills. Hiring people with the right attitude and traits that are a good cultural fit will ensure good performance later on rather than those who have shown red flags. They should have the appropriate mix of traits necessary for success while being highly skilled and trained (which means that your investment in training should be ongoing).
Communicate Company Mission and Set Goals
When employees understand the company’s mission and objectives, they will be able to sell more products and services. For example. knowing how each sale contributes to bringing changes to their community will motivate the team to do their work more effectively. Setting goals for a team gives them a map to follow through and not lose the momentum of the day-to-day activities. This gives your team outlined goals and methods to work towards, which will lead to a feeling of accomplishment once achieved. Also, goal setting inspires higher performance within the team and increases productivity.
Encourage Collaboration
Collaboration is an integral part of a successful work culture today. No business has been successful by isolating team members and having them work independently of others. The truth is that every team needs and depends on others to make successful sales to consumers. For instance, the sales team depends on the marketing team to understand their targeted customers and goals. For this reason, it is important to have proper alignment between the two teams as this will ensure team success as tasks will be divided and actioned at a quicker rate.
Benefits of Team Collaboration Include:
- Communication increases
- Boosts morale
- Increases efficiency
- Encourages creativity
- Increases performance
- Builds trust between teams
By encouraging collaboration within your team, you will see sales growth for years to come.
Build a Strong Team
Encourage teamwork among team members by putting in place processes that facilitate knowledge sharing, trust, and open communication. For example show your team that you recognize each member’s contribution, acknowledge their strength, applaud team leaders publicly and provide them with tools and training that will improve their skills. For instance, offer opportunities to your team for continuous learning. Sales managers should foster an environment that promotes learning, constant training, and sales coaching for reps. Set aside time each week for every sales rep, and hold training sessions for your team to develop sales skills. Growth opportunities allow sales reps to make improvements related to their career skills and decrease the likelihood that they will leave the company.
Celebrate Small Wins and Talk About Failure
Promote a culture that celebrates wins openly no matter how small they are. Set expectations for your team and recognize good performance by giving them the respect and appreciation they deserve. While bonuses and over the top incentives are okay, ensure that they don’t create unhealthy competition among the team members.
Promote transparency by encouraging your team to share their failures because failure is ok and it brings an opportunity to learn and grow from it. This will help your team have a more realistic approach to meeting their goals and targets.
Master a Sales Training Process
Your company’s job is to give your salespeople the tools and training they need to succeed in their position. Sales cultures have well-defined systems to help their salespeople grow, learn and achieve. This is especially important for new hires, but you also need to have some way to deliver on-going advanced sales training ideas for your entire sales team. If you don’t think this is important, then determine how much it costs you on average to hire someone and multiply that by the number of salespeople who didn’t make it last year; you’ll quickly see it’s worth.
Monitor Daily Activity
Sales are driven first and foremost by numbers. Even though salespeople do not have control over who will buy a product or service, you should ensure that your team’s daily activities focus on establishing routines and processes that will bring long term success. The data that the team gathers from their successful or failed sales attempts can be used to monitor customer’s behaviors, interests, and needs. This data, in turn, can be used to refine their sales pitch and hopefully increase sales.
Accountability
When working in a team, accountability is always important to ensure that everyone is responsible for their tasks and duties. Everyone should be aware of the methods to which performance is measured. You can create accountability by setting clear expectations from each team member and share honest and constructive feedback when tracking the team’s progress. Accountability will encourage people to hold themselves to a higher standard and contribute to their full potential. As a team leader, lead by example by committing to your goals, taking ownership of your mistakes, and being accountable for your actions.
Agility
A sales culture continues to evolve over time. People and processes grow as they learn more about new technology and industry trends. Every team member needs to have up to date information and adjust accordingly to be more effective.
An agile sales team will have all relevant sales metrics right at their fingertips. Having access to real-time data will allow the team to stay ahead of the game and pivot strategies if needed.
What Makes a Successful Sales Team?
A successful sales team believes in the mission and values of the company. If one person lacks this passion, the entire team is affected.
Does your sales team have passion for what they do? Lack of passion does impact the results of sales. Whether it’s retail sales, telephone sales, or an account executive, sales passion is an important part of sales culture.
What are Successful Sales Team Characteristics?
If you had to choose and put together a successful sales team, what would you consider a good trait for each person?
Valuable individual habits merged together can create a winning team that extends beyond what can be taught in sales coaching. As a sales manager, building a successful team means knowing each member’s value and providing them with tools and support to help them grow in a team environment.
Let’s look at the traits of high-performing sales teams. Incorporating individuals with these traits within your team. This will help you create a sales culture where the team achieves its own goals and sees the benefit of working with others to perform better.
A successful sales team has the following characteristics:
Able to Accomplish Profitable Business Goals
To accomplish profitable business goals, every team member must be trustworthy and trusting of each other. Teams that trust each other will solve conflicts and establish accountable routines to help them grow.
Never Stops Learning
A crucial part of growing is continuous curiosity and eagerness to learn. A good salesman is always learning about the market, best practices, new norms, customer base behavior, and better sales techniques.
Has Character
An uninteresting group of sales reps will struggle to make sales. In order to push the envelope and challenge the norm, find individuals on your team who are willing to challenge assumptions, question normalcy, and strive toward disrupting the status quo in your organization.
Understands Customers
They are willing to spend ample time with a customer to understand the customers’ needs and try their best to make sure they feel valued, and their opinions matter. This will encourage a customer to make a purchase of the business products.
Good Communication Skills
One of the key factors for a company’s success is communication. A good team player is able to communicate well within a team, with other teams, and a customer. This entails listening well when others communicate any information, ideas, or data and keep themselves accountable for any commitments they have made.
Excellent Time Management
Sales work can get busy, but a sales team always knows how to use their time wisely by incorporating methods and tools that save time. These tools include CRM software, sales automation platform, collaboration software, and many more.
Important time management skills include:
- Strategic thinking
- Scheduling
- Managing appointments
- Record keeping
- Prioritizing
- Delegation
- Decision-making
- Goal setting
- Multitasking
- Problem-solving
They Make Promises They Can Keep
Successful sales team ensures that they follow through with commitments they have made to their team lead, team members, and customers or leads.
Celebrates the Little Wins
Celebrates hitting key performance indicator (KPI) targets. No matter how small, celebrating milestones and wins motivates the team and creates better synergy and sales team culture.
Benefits of Establishing a Sales Culture
Aligning your company with a winning sales culture gives many benefits to your business. Some of the benefits that a business will include:
- Spread excellence to other departments.
- Improves overall team dynamics and bond.
- Increases sales and hence profits to the business.
- Improves how salespeople interact with potential customers.
- It helps your team grow and turns every member into a sales leader.
- Encourage friendly competition.
- Encourages trust among team members and customers.
Create a Thriving Sales Team
It is not easy creating a thriving sales team culture. The process requires time and constant improvisation in building and establishing habits and routines. Also, it is a team effort not to be undertaken by one person alone. In time you will be able to meet your goals and targets by having the right people by your side and the right methodologies.
By implementing the above tips, you will be well on your way to improving your sales culture and having a successful sales team!
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Do you have a thriving sales culture?
Always remember good company culture starts with you looking to create a successful sales team. If you need any assistance to help your business grow by creating a sales culture, connect with our team, and one of our experts will guide you throughout the whole process.
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