How to Create a Winning Sales Culture

So, you’ve compiled some of the best salespeople in your industry with proven track records and resumes a mile long to prove it. But your sales are still not improving like they should be. Should you hire more or different salespeople? Change managers and sales leads? Revamp your sales strategy entirely?  No, we don’t think so. We think your problem might be within the culture of your organization, not the staffing.

What is a Winning Sales Culture?

The culture associated with your sales team is the attitude and habits that they have, and the behaviors that they exhibit. A winning sales culture is one that includes positive attitudes, competitive yet friendly sales reps, and a team that wants to win by meeting high expectations and consistently reaching sales goals.  This culture is very important when building a successful sales team.

How Do You Create a Winning Sales Culture?

In order to create a winning sales culture, here are some tips:

1. Have a Unified Front

In order to make sure you have a unified front, make sure you share with your team what the company’s mission is.  Keeping reminders around the office or virtual workspaces is a good way to reiterate the mission now and then to keep everyone on message.  

Also, have specific goals to target and objectives to get everyone there.  Make sure everyone knows what they are and remind them to hit their milestones and targets. Also, give them recognition when they do hit these goals.  Encourage accomplishing them as a team for the good of the organization in order to keep that unified front.  There are opportunities to encourage a little friendly competition in other ways.

LinkedIn suggests combining sales and marketing for an even more effective unified front. Having these sometimes siloed departments work more closely together can have a large impact on the bottom line.

2. Lead By Example

It’s all well and good to tell your sales team what to do, but if you show them what to do and how to behave, they’re more likely to follow. Show them that the managers are working just as hard, if not harder, and show everyone the result of all that hard work.

You can tell them what you want out of them all day every day and it still won’t have nearly the impact as leading by example. 

3. Provide Encouragement

You can get a lot more from people by being nice than from being mean or, as the saying goes, you can catch more flies with honey.  In terms of creating a winning sales culture, what this means is that providing encouragement and constructive feedback is going to be a better way to get your sales staff to reach their goals and stay motivated to sell.

Part of this is also to encourage them to provide feedback to you.  Ask them how you’re doing or what they see as an opportunity to grow sales. They’re the ones on the frontlines, meeting with prospects, and making sales.  They’ll have good input too.

4. Recognize and Incentivize

As mentioned above, giving recognition to meeting sales goals and company goals is very motivating. It’s motivating for a couple of reasons.  First, it gives credit where credit is due…to the person responsible for helping the company reach its goals, which will encourage them to keep going along that path.  Second, it will motivate others to try to achieve goals in order to get the recognition they desire as well.  

On a similar note, be sure to incentivize your salespeople to keep them reaching for more.  Incentives can be monetary, up to and including using a compensation scale that is focused on sales, or they can be extra vacation time, trips, gift cards, etc.  Smallbizdaily.com recommends giving your employees a memorable experience, which would be more personalized for them, or to pick a gift with lasting value or does some good for a cause of their choosing.

5. Hire the Right Sales Staff

Of course, part of building a winning sales culture is to have the right staff.  However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to have stellar sales records.  To have a winning sales culture, your staff should have characteristics such as competitiveness so they are driven to make sales merely by wanting to better themselves or their coworkers.  However, a competitive sales rep that has a lousy attitude isn’t going to give you the culture you desire.  Hire staff that has a positive attitude.

Also, hire sales staff that can get along with management and their coworkers.  Not only will that help you with your sales culture, but it will help ensure they will build a good rapport with prospects and customers, as good salespeople should do.

5. Train Your Sales Staff

Providing effective training for your sales staff cannot be underrated. Not just at the beginning either; provide continuous training on topics that will benefit your staff and your organization alike.  You’ll never run out of ideas to provide more training. 

Mandating training is one route, but going back to the idea of incentivizing staff for participating in the training will be even better.  Offering raises or bonuses, for instance, may do the trick. However, just having it offered to them and letting them know how it will benefit them will most likely be enough…if you’ve hired the right staff! Medium.com considers the willingness to train hard the key characteristic of a successful sales team. That’s a big endorsement.

7. Update and Upgrade 

Finally, you’ll want to make sure that your team is as up-to-date with their practices and their software as possible. This will ensure that they have the knowledge and the tools necessary to do their jobs and to do them well.  This will require keeping them up-to-date on best practices and the latest and greatest methodologies in the sales world.

This tip also involves ensuring they have access to the best software available and that they can seamlessly upgrade when needed.  This will allow them to do their jobs better and save you time and money in the long run. 

Choosing a robust Customer Resource Management (CRM) will be key.  Choosing a Software-as-a-Service (Saas), cloud-based service will allow them to access it from anywhere to upgrade it without having to upgrade the hardware too forcing your hard-working sales team to spend time out of the field. 

How Can You Make it Happen?

As you can see, creating a winning sales team is much different than creating a winning sales culture and can make all the difference.  This is where Agile CRM can help.  With its all-in-one capabilities, it can be the hub for all of your sales and marketing needs and to keep your messaging visible to have a unified front.  It will also allow for transparency so you are more easily able to lead by example and provide the encouragement and recognition your sales team deserves.

As a SaaS solution, Agile CRM is also accessible anywhere at any time. Plus, Agile CRM offers powerful features to help build a winning sales culture, including:

• Lead scoring
• Gamification
• Deal tracking
• Appointment scheduling
• Project management
• And so much more

Once your sales culture is where you want it to be by following these tips, you’ll see how easy it is to perpetuate the culture and continuously increase your sales.