Everybody agrees that building and maintaining a great sales culture will make or break your business. But being honest with each other here, sales culture is a blurred buzzword and most people are unsure how to influence it and just believe it is a natural occurrence if you hire the right people. Don’t get me wrong, hiring the right people is part of building a great sales culture, but there are a lot more things we can actively do to design and cultivate a successful and high-performing sales culture.
To do this we need to focus on 2 core principles: customer-centric culture and team success recognition. If you master and always come back to these first principles you will build a sales culture that attracts and retains top talents.
Build a company-wide customer-centric culture first
Just like sales culture, building a customer-centric culture is something we often hear about but are not sure how to implement. We often see companies that claim at the top of their lungs that they are customer-centric but all their systems and processes are built to gather what the company needs and to make their lives easier regardless of their customers’ buying behavior. How do we avoid this?
Set a clear vision and goals for your company
Setting a clear vision for your company is the cornerstone of any culture you’d like to build. As Simon Sinek would say: Find your why. Why is your company doing the things it is doing? What are you trying to disrupt, evolve,…? What revolution are you leading?
Once you have that grand vision it’s time to break it down into attainable goals that your different teams can chase. Usually a mix of financial goals, the number of customers acquired, and the impact on these customers. E.g. We will generate $1M by the end of the year by onboarding 100 customers and generate $10M for them in that same year. Or any other pain point you’re trying to solve for them.
Customer-centric processes and systems
This is where it will become painful for a lot of organizations out there. If you built your processes because you needed to collect specific information but can’t articulate a single answer on what is your customers’ buying behavior, YOU ARE NOT CUSTOMER CENTRIC. Your processes should be built around your customers and not around your company with customers having to adapt to you.
Sales is all about building relationships and trust. Whether you use a funnel approach, a bowtie approach, or a flywheel approach, trust and relationships are built by meeting your customers where they are and holding their hands all the way to where you need them to be.
Trust and alignment across your organization
As I said before, sales don’t live on an island in your company. On top of that sales is one of the toughest departments in your company. That is why it is important that your go-to-market (GTM) teams are aligned and trust each other. Too often we see figures pointing between sales and marketing about lead quality and between sales and customer success regarding customer handover to onboarding.
To fix this we can leverage two things:
- Building shared accountability: this is where Revops probably has the most influence. On top of holding teams accountable for their actions, it is also important to build shared objectives. Aligning marketing, sales, and customer success on a single revenue target can work wonders as it will force reliance and cooperation between teams.
- Increasing cultural acceptance: Although you have an overarching company culture, each department also has its own culture. Sales can be seen as obnoxious to other departments as their job is to never accept no for an answer. That’s why you hired them, but it can create tensions when other teams inside the company say no to them. Just like your engineering team might sometimes need peace and quiet to push through a sprint which is a foreign concept to your GTM teams.
Recognize team and individual success to foster high performance.
Any great sales team with a perfect culture will run on the GEL framework: grow, earn, learn. This is the glue that will foster enthusiasm and keep your team together – pun intended.
Do you want to build a great sales culture? Where you are fostering healthy competition, not a cut-throat environment. Where there is low rep turnover, knowledge sharing, communication, collaboration, and trust. Then remember the GEL framework.
Start by building a growth culture, not a performance one.
What does growth culture mean? How is it different from a performance culture?
A growth culture will focus on the growth of each individual in the team compared to a performance culture that will focus on the outcome of each individual. Building a growth culture starts by hiring the right people. They don’t have to be top talent yet but they have to display traits that indicate they can be in the future. If you have built the right environment then, more than attracting top talents, you will become a factory that produces them.
Like everything else you need to make it fair and transparent so that both the sales and your company can reap the benefits of the growth culture.
What better way to solve this than to build a sales career path so that each member of your team knows exactly what needs to be done to be able to grow in your organization?
Building a clear and transparent sales career path reduces uncertainty and creates incentives to perform for your salespeople. When you have a clear road, all that remains is to put the pedal to the metal.
Check our sales career path post to learn how to build one.
High risks mean high rewards.
Let’s not kid ourselves here. Although I’m sure you have an amazing company, what attracts people to sales positions is usually the potential earnings attached to it.
A salesperson can make a lot of money depending on his skills, seniority, the product/service they are selling, and to whom they are selling. I.e. selling a high ticket service to a Forbes 500 company generally means more commission than selling a $20 saas to local stores.
Multiple ways to incentivize salespeople exist. Spiffs, sales commissions, bonuses, president clubs, and many more. Two main things need to be considered if you want to be successful here: sales quotas and sales incentives plan.
Let’s start with sales quotas. Put them to high and you risk demotivating your sales teams that will never be able to reach them. Putting them too low and you are leaving money on the table. Worse, your CAC could go through the roof. We recommend adopting a more dependency-sensitive approach that will protect the bank while incentivizing sales to outperform themselves.
Check our cost-driven approach to setting sales quotas here.
Now that the targets are all set, it’s time to pay your salespeople their due. Problem, your sales team might be composed of SDRs, AEs, team leaders, and managers. You want to make sure that you compensate them all fairly but they don’t have the impact and contribution to the new revenue generated.
Fear not, we have broken down the best way to build your sales incentives plan per position here.
You also need to learn and upskill yourself to grow
Often overlooked or poorly managed either by the sales manager or the sales enablement, learning should be inherent to the job of sales. Whether we are talking about direct coaching, performance management, or broader training around business acumen, upskilling your salespeople is the best way to increase retention for your company and to help them evolve in your sales career path.
Focusing on 3 points will help you become that top talent factory:
- Deep sales tactics and framework: We are not talking about cheap and obscure tactics to lure the lead to take a call here. This is about understanding psychology. How tone of voice impacts your sales. How to use frameworks like Spinn, AKA, Meddic… to run a proper sales pitch and handle objections. What does it mean to sell and build trust with clients?
- Building business acumen and understanding that sales are a cog in a bigger machine. This will help them better understand their customers’ pains and needs and better understand and work with other departments in your organization.
- Performance management to review pipelines and make sure they know how to properly work them. Help them unblock certain accounts and how they can self-serve in the future. Deep diving on calls, emails, and content to help them own and improve their craft.
