Company culture can make or break a sales team. Sales leaders have seen promising sales representatives start off strong, then plateau and ultimately burn out more times than they can count. Tough days of rejection in the field are challenging to overcome and are major contributors to the high attrition rate associated with sales positions.
A study conducted by the University of Southern California used neuro-imagery to show that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions rather than information. Do your sales emails and marketing pieces motivate your would-be customers with clear, compelling calls to action, or is your message dismissed and overlooked? Testing a new CTA, or simply making small changes to your existing one, is the best way to answer this question.
Sales representatives need a strong sense of connection and purpose to recover from those tough days and rebound with a driven, winning attitude. Building trust is key to building this kind of workplace culture. Unfortunately, many communication practices we’ve been taught result in misunderstanding and conflict. Consider making these adjustments to help your good intentions result in meaningful, positive change for your team.
Stop ignoring break-up behaviors. According to noted relationship expert Dr. John Gottam, four communication qualities that predict a couple will break up are criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. These qualities are not necessarily symptoms of unhappiness, but the instigators of trouble. When we choose these behaviors, we pick up the hammer and pick and actively chip away at our once rock-solid trust.
Stop sandwiching all feedback. When you sandwich feedback, you place the issue at hand between two compliments. While the compliments may be true, this method is painfully transparent and leaves people feeling manipulated. If you always serve up feedback as a sandwich, you risk diminishing the value of everything you want to convey.
Stop venting on the sidelines. When we express frustrations solely on the sidelines rather than directly and respectfully, we become focused on fueling the issue rather than on achieving a resolution. Encourage your team to ask questions like, “Why have we done it this way in the past?” and “What is at risk if we try a different approach?” when they have concerns over something brought up in a staff meeting. This kind of transparency builds trust and can make your meetings more valuable and productive.
Strong workplace culture doesn’t happen overnight, but small meaningful changes can help you build an environment your team will want to come back to every day.
Is the next generation of salespeople heading toward extinction?
Former IBM president Thomas Watson was known for saying, “Nothing happens until a sale is made.” We saw that truth painfully realized during the 2007-09 recession. According to a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as demand plummeted, approximately 1.6 million sales jobs were cut across multiple industries.
Sales jobs are among the fastest growing and highest paying. However, risk-averse millennials aren’t necessarily lining up for these positions or viewing sales as a long-term career. Recruiting challenges, training expenses and high turnover also make sales positions among the most costly to fill. With all these challenges, are sales teams facing an unavoidable demise?
The carrots we traditionally dangle to recruit sales people are the promise of a competitive environment as well as big commission payouts and bonuses for the financially driven. However, the often-overlooked perks of sales jobs are huge selling points for reaching the next generation of sales people.
Field sales positions offer the kind of flexibility many other jobs struggle to effectively provide. The flexible hours and constant change of scenery allow sales people control over when, where and how they work.
Sales jobs also naturally draw from the most beneficial elements of part-time telecommuting. When managed to foster collaboration over isolation, a virtual team environment is highly enticing to a workforce with increased interest in online communication and self-managed work environments. Whether in-house face time with your sales team is limited because the team is scattered across satellite offices or because your team is on the road most of the day, meaningful virtual communication is critical.
Consider the ideas below to begin building a standard of collaboration.
Work together to create a communication charter to establish the norms of behavior at virtual meetings or for periodic social or text check-ins.
Build rhythm by setting value-added standing team meetings that include the use of social networking features. Keep virtual meetings short and to the point, and create a regular agenda to keep everyone on task. An agenda could be as simple as each person sharing a status update in this format: tasks I said I’d do this week and the results; issues that came up; what I’m doing next week.
Kick off virtual team meetings with an icebreaker. Assign a different person each week to plan and lead the icebreaker.
Grow leadership within the team by delegating special projects, assigning mentors and asking the group to share best practices.
Hold regular one-on-one meetings and coaching sessions.
Propose an aggressive goal for your team, and track successes online where everyone can see the progress. We often ignore the decline of a species until extinction becomes inevitable, but creating environments meant to attract, retain and sustain top talent will ensure the existence of sales teams of the future.