Take a hard look at the best sales teams — the ones that really blow their quota out of the water. What do you see? Look past the high fives, the ring of the sales bell, or even the energy on the floor at any given moment. You’ll see the best sales teams are getting better every single day.
They make it easy for new and seasoned reps alike to improve, which gives them the best chance to beat quota. How do they do it? Here are the tips for creating a winning sales culture through sales training and beyond.
4 Tips for a Winning Sales Culture
1. Make it start with you
As the sales manager or leader, your strategy for getting better can’t be having your reps smile and dial. You set the standard for what good looks like. So, show your team that it’s good to take time to develop a strategy for outreach and write down assumptions.
Remember, in sales, we’re graded on outcomes as well as activity. Reward your most efficient and effective reps in addition to your volume players.
2. Focus on your offering
One of the most important parts of sales training is understanding the product. Every single team will focus on the product category (e.g., “This is why having a CRM is important.”) or the competition (e.g., “Why we’re better than Competitor Y.”).
What most sales teams forget to tell you is what exactly you’re selling (e.g., “Are we selling vitamins or painkillers?”).
This makes a massive difference. To a person in pain, a painkiller is the only solution. There will be implicit urgency, and your product has a built-in answer to “Why us?” — one of the toughest messaging questions in sales.
If you’re selling vitamins, you must discover how to manufacture that urgency. The more exposure you can give new reps to your customers to answer the vitamin or painkiller question, the more effective they’ll be in talking with prospects.
3. Create an environment of iteration
Some sales teams come in every day and do exactly the same thing. They send the same emails at the same time and read from the same dial scripts day in and day out. Are these teams getting any better?
Compare that with the team that kicks off a three-week campaign where reps are trying a new sales script variation or a new channel (e.g., LinkedIn automation or handwritten letters after the call).
Some of the new tactics might not work, but the ones that do will become ingrained in your new sales process — one that yields better outcomes.
By creating an environment of iteration, you make it possible for your reps to work smarter, not harder. Having regular ideation meetings and reviews instead of simply weekly updates can drive massive results for your team.
4. Foster autonomy
Larger sales teams live off consistency, sometimes at the expense of rep autonomy. If you want a team that learns and improves over time, you must get comfortable handing the steering wheel over to your reps.
Let your team know what’s set in stone and what isn’t. Encourage them to test the waters and author some of the plays in your sales playbook. If you don’t make this abundantly clear from the beginning, your team will get stuck in what’s worked in the past and forget about ways to innovate and improve.
If your business is like a war, your sales team is on the front lines. A single BDR has more interaction with customers and prospects in a month than a product manager has in a year.
They’ll know when the tide of battle is turning in your favor or against you. They’ll also be the most willing to adapt, if you let them. By creating a feedback loop and letting your sales team iterate, you’ll learn about the customer and how to win business every single day you walk into the office.
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