There are varying perspectives on what makes a great sales team culture. From extreme competitiveness to collaboration and knowledge sharing, every organisation has its own approach, generally predicated on the sales manager’s philosophies and experiences. While each team will undoubtedly bring their own personality, there are several shared attributes across organisations and geographies that make for a successful culture.
Commitment to shared learning
The best sales teams have a culture that is based on the principle of continuous growth. A team that is not learning is not improving. Regular training sessions are key to ensuring that your team is not only continually developing new skills but is continually challenged and stimulated at work. Without this culture of professional development and engagement, high churn rates and low productivity can be expected, not matter how talented the representatives are.
Collaborative learning is vital to encourage professional development. Every team member should be invested in the organisation’s success, and that team mentality should be recognised and rewarded. Without this approach, salespeople will keep winning strategies and approaches to themselves, preventing others from learning from their successes. While healthy competition is needed in any sales team environment, it’s important for sales managers to frame knowledge sharing as a key performance indicator.
Complete transparency
If there is one trait that is common across all unsuccessful sales teams, it’s a lack of visibility and transparency. This goes for periods of high performance as well as slumps. If the team isn’t sharing strategies and logging all communications in the CRM, it will be very difficult to replicate success from one representative to another. If a hyper-competitive environment has been created, representatives may not be forthcoming with bad news, creating the illusion that the pipeline is fuller than it is.
With research finding that although 99.1% of people prefer a workplace where people identify and discuss issues truthfully and effectively, only 50% say their organisations do so. Talking about mistakes and failures is difficult, and it’s understandable why salespeople would want to gloss over poor performance, especially when mistakes are met with immediate repercussions.
Promoting transparency is as much about culture as it is about process. On the culture front, make sure representatives know that mistakes are bound to happen. If team members are forthcoming and raise concerns as soon as they happen so that they don’t get repeated, representatives should be rewarded instead of punished. On the process side, sales managers need to be adamant about proper CRM usage. Every conversation must be logged to promote full visibility and develop and strong dataset.
Friendly competition
Friendly competition is key to motivating sales teams to do their best. Salespeople, in general, tend to be naturally competitive, so the best managers can harness that trait to create a high-performing environment.
However, the operative word is ‘friendly’. A recent study found that 43% of employees would leave their company if the work environment became too competitive. Unfortunately, many organisations create hyper-competitive environments that prevent knowledge sharing and limit data visibility because salespeople are so focused on keeping their ‘secrets’ to themselves.
Teams that strike the right balance tend to focus on rewarding stellar performance instead of punishing the rest of the team. Competitors are set up with realistic targets and are focused on prizes and recognition for winners. When a salesperson reaches a target or wins a competition, they are expected to share the approach (channels, messaging, personas, etc) that made the difference so that the team can improve the following month or quarter.
Clear evaluation and continuous improvement framework
As with any team, having a common goal and vision is critical. It can be easy to fall into a daily routine, with everyone focusing on that day’s activity numbers or that month’s quota, but what does it all mean? What are they working towards?
It’s important to frame the team and organisation’s success as the rep’s success. If they meet their targets, that means either additional compensation or professional growth, or both. Cultures that promote a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ mentality tend to perform much better than those that push quotas and goals from the top down.
Building a successful sales culture is difficult, especially when the team consists of young, inexperienced representatives. It takes a lot of energy, coaching, and strategic foresight to create the type of environment that motivates high performance without breeding toxicity or churn. However, if the four attributes above are actively being worked on, the team is in a good position to develop a successful sales culture.
