Any sales professional, whether you’re a top 20% rep or managing a group with a lot of potential, knows the either detrimental or exceptional effects your B2B sales team’s culture can have on your business’s bottom-line. In a study of 64 organizations, it was found that those with highly engaged employees received double the annual net income compared to their competitors, who lacked any form of engagement.
Your change towards a better sales team culture and more engaged employees doesn’t have to take place all at once. In fact, the best way to improve your team’s culture is by making a whole bunch of little changes that overall invoke big change in the long run.
If you’re experiencing high turnover rates, tense rivalries between reps, or bad attitudes in the office, these are warning signs that it’s time for a change. Here is a list of the most impactful ways to achieve a better culture within your sales team and soak up all the positive benefits that culture brings.
1. Create an Atmosphere of Healthy Competition
As Colin Powell said, “The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting above average effort.” Fostering this kind of friendly competition in the workplace can not only help to increase sales from both the laggards and the stars, but it also creates a fun environment for people to succeed.
Those of us that get involved in sales professions tend to have an instinctive nab for competition. Utilize this fever for competition in your reps to foster greater productivity. It must be duly noted, however, that this “fever for competition” is definitely a two-way streak and must be managed carefully. Since competition can also turn a workplace into a mad house of backstabbers and one-uppers, make sure to reiterate that we’re all in this together; everyone’s playing for the same team.
A great way to invoke competition but also maintain an even playing field is by having each rep challenge themselves by trying to beat their own personal goals. This way, everyone’s still trying to compete, but only to improve themselves and not to take down their fellow colleagues.
2. Implement Innovative Technology
Teams that stay up to date and rolling with the new happenings in the sales industry tend to see both happier customers and happier salespeople from within. Today, your entire sales department can and should be connected at all times. With mobile solutions, the days of sending mail and keeping paper files are diminishing.
Tablet-based sales apps and connected CRMs allow you to simplify and streamline the sales process completely. Since time is one of the most precious commodities for sales reps, allowing them to focus more on actually selling rather than administrative tasks will improve sales rep satisfaction, and make for an overall more motivated and effective sales team. Keep up to date on new tech releases so your sales reps can have access to the best sales tools. Not to mention the fact that everyone will be thrilled to be playing and experimenting with their new toys!
3. Celebrate good times, Come on!
Amidst cold calling, emailing and researching, sales teams often forget to smile and to just have fun. The thing that spirals teams into a downward cycle of bad team culture is forgetting to have fun. Buried among sales metrics, performance, and goals, the fun factor is easily forgotten. When it comes down to it, what engages sales reps more than success is their ability to enjoy their work and their time with their co-workers.
Celebrate when the team hits their goals. This is imperative for building a strong team and a great team culture. Of course, the reason everyone comes to work in the morning isn’t merely to have fun for that they have outside lives (I hope), but it is rewarding and encouraging to come to work everyday if you’re being positively reinforced.
A team celebration can mean treating them to an out-of-office lunch to show appreciation and that you’ve noticed their hard work, or it can be something as small as bringing everyone’s attention to a high achiever by posting their picture on the wall. It’s important to encourage one another by celebrating the small and big achievements, ultimately creating a supportive and motivating culture with that little extra push everyone needs.
4. Provide Transparency
Not only is it important to discuss and celebrate the positive things going on within the team, but it’s equally important to talk about what’s not going well and constructively resolve these issues. Although it would be marvelous if your team made their quarterly goals every time, it most likely won’t happen every time. Transparency means talking about things that didn’t go well, not just covering them up.
It shows more about a sales team’s culture by looking at how they deal with failures than how they celebrate their successes. Addressing issues within the team and encouraging your lacking reps to step up is a lot more challenging. There’s a fine line between not invoking any change and being too harsh, which could result in too much pressure and actually decrease performance.
By talking calmly talking through the challenges your reps are facing, you’ll open up a discussion, and maybe even find that other reps are experiencing similar problems and they can help each other through them. Many teams that are successful in providing transparency display leader boards of all the sales to see what areas need improvement or send regular recap memos to ensure everyone’s aware of what’s going on and can be constructive in finding a solution.
Building a culture that fosters productivity and transparency in your sales team is not easy, but it is necessary, especially if you want to battle high turnover rates and cultivate more engaged employees. What other tips do you have for building a successful sales culture?
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