A WORD FROM DUANE SPARKS
Dear Sales Executive:
What would it mean for your company to have the best sales culture in your industry? Not just the best sales force, mind you, but the best sales culture. The terms do not mean the same thing.
Great salespeople are a tremendous asset to any organization. But they are only one feature of a great sales culture. You need more…a lot more. Fortunately, you’ve come to the right place.
If you have a question about how to build a genuinely great sales culture in your company, click on “Ask The eCoach“.
We are committed to your professional success.
Duane Sparks
Author of Action Selling ®
What does this all mean for you? When you get sales culture right, you can build and retain a cohesive team of sales and service professionals. You’ll set better goals and accomplish them more frequently. Any performance issues that arise will be far easier to discuss and resolve. It becomes simpler to forecast results and stay on plan. Sales grow. Margins grow. Profits grow.
Oh, and there’s an added bonus. Because life is so much better when you play for a winning team, everybody’s job becomes more fun.
For a fuller explanation of sales culture and the way to create the best one in your industry, download our free white paper, Want a Better Sales Culture?
Want to Create the Best Sales Culture?
“Culture” refers to the way that a group of people customarily think, speak, and behave. A company’s “sales culture” is the sum total of the way its people think, speak, and behave with prospects and customers—and with one another—at every step in the company’s sales process.
In the past few editions of eCoach, we have talked about the importance of a strong sales culture and how to start evaluating your own. But, one point about this subject cannot be overemphasized: Sales culture is not only about your sales force.
Sales culture isn’t only about your sales force
To improve the sales culture in your company, you have to do more than improve your sales team. You also must improve your sales leadership. And, last but not least, you must improve everyone around your sales team who comes into contact with customers.
If you are serious about creating a great sales culture, each of these groups needs training, reinforcement, and certification on a particular set of skills that improve their ability to generate sales and drive customer loyalty. When the training is implemented properly and with the right content, you’ll reap significant rewards:
- Processes for continuous improvement in sales culture
- Company-wide common sales language
- Better hiring and reduced turnover
- Maximize sales growth and customer loyalty
- Sales culture becomes a competitive advantage
The best sales cultures have a common language and common processes that are used by everyone who comes into contact with customers. Every customer-facing employee can engage the customer in a conversation that enables them to identify the customer’s needs, recommend solutions, and gain commitments. When this communication process is practiced consistently, sales goals get met. More than that, customers become genuinely loyal, and an unbeatable sales culture grows.
The process works for sales leaders too. Since salespeople and customer-contact employees are essentially the customers of sales leadership, the goal of most communication we have with our sales and service teams is to understand an employee’s situation, present a solution, and gain agreement to implement the solution. A systematic communication process that helps us do that consistently is worth its weight in gold.
Here is a simplified, graphic view of how The Sales Board builds great sales cultures in client companies:
What does this all mean for you? When you get sales culture right, you can build and retain a cohesive team of sales and service professionals. You’ll set better goals and accomplish them more frequently. Any performance issues that arise will be far easier to discuss and resolve. It becomes simpler to forecast results and stay on plan. Sales grow. Margins grow. Profits grow.
Oh, and there’s an added bonus. Because life is so much better when you play for a winning team, everybody’s job becomes more fun.
For a fuller explanation of sales culture and the way to create the best one in your industry, download our free white paper, Want a Better Sales Culture?
Action Selling ® in Action
When CEO Chip Emery purchased Supply Chain Services, a barcode-solutions company in Stillwater, Minn., he contacted The Sales Board to help develop the sales culture at his new company.
“We didn’t have a cohesive process for communicating with customers and prospects,” Emery says. “We didn’t have a clearly defined sales-cycle process either. Without these in place, hitting the aggressive growth goals we had would be difficult or impossible.”
There was a silver lining, Emery says: “This also meant we saw an opportunity to quickly ramp up sales. But, we needed a culture change—not just with our sales team, but with every member of the company.”
Chief operating officer Dave Green headed up the initiative to change the sales culture. Says Green: “We decided to include everyone in the training we did – sales, sales administration, technicians, marketing, and even our CFO. By doing all this, we expected to achieve a 20 percent lift in sales revenue. We actually got 60 percent.”
For information about how to make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.
Learn more about how to build a winning sales culture. See our free white paper, Want a Better Sales Culture?
