What is sales culture? Sales culture is the attitude, behaviors and habits your sales team exemplifies at a particular time and place. An organization’s sales culture is important when sales and appointments are up, and when they’re down. A positive, successful sales culture can bring out the best in your team. The opposite is also true.
Consider the following characteristics to understand if your organization has a great sales culture and how to continually improve on it.
How can you know what needs to be changed if nothing is written down to begin with? Similar to a mission statement or core values, your organization should have a sales culture definition that’s customized. Your organization’s sales culture definition can be a sentence, or just a collection of words that act as a guiding principle. Consider the answers to these questions:
By considering these questions and jotting down the answers, it becomes easier to understand when your sales culture is slipping, who isn’t a great fit for your organization, and the type of talent you’re looking to bring to your team. Your team should be able to answer the questions, what is sales culture and what does it mean for this organization?
Executed well, healthy competition within your sales culture can positively impact everyone on the team. Fostering healthy competition requires transparency into team and personal performance – a must-have quality of all teams and organizations in and outside of sales.
Additionally, healthy competition introduces motivational factors, camaraderie and sharing of best-practices among team members. Increased communication and collaboration, as well as accountability are natural outputs that also serve as tremendous assets for your sales culture.
Read More: How to Hold Your Team Accountable When You Never See Them
The circumstances in which your team is selling change frequently. Their approach at the start or end of a fiscal year could be different from halfway through a fiscal year. Economic, political and even social events that send ripples through industries can be cause to course-correct. A great sales culture prioritizes continual learning and development so the team’s tool belts are always expanding.
This learning and development can come in many forms: regular sales coaching as well as courses or certifications that can be taken independently. Sales managers must monitor sales performance metrics to understand specific areas of weakness and always work to improve.
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Don’t misunderstand the role that agility plays in your sales culture. Having an effective sales funnel process as the cornerstone of your sales efforts is essential. What must be avoided is the adage “this is the way we’ve always done things.” In the spirit of continual learning and development means employing new tactics or approaches in an attempt to optimize the process.
With an effective sales funnel process grounded in data, your team can always look to the numbers to understand if new tactics or approaches are worthwhile.
We’ve instilled an air of healthy competition, and accountability and proactivity soon follow. Those efforts should be celebrated. The importance of recognition from leadership, as well as peer-to-peer recognition cannot be overstated. However, praise can definitely be overdone. It loses its meaning and importance when offered too regularly. A successful learning and coaching culture focuses on what sellers are doing right and where they are strong before moving on to areas of improvement.
Read More: How to Build a World-Class Sales Team
It’s important to take a pulse check to understand the role sales culture plays in your organization, and what its current status is. While there’s no one-size-fits all method, focusing on the must-haves mentioned above can influence your organization’s sales culture – thus influencing your team member’s and your growth.
Funnel Clarity provides sales coaching for individuals and teams, ensuring the process of transparency, accountability and continuous improvement become a part of your company’s sales culture. Reach out today to schedule a free conversation to discuss your sales culture.
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