How To Build
a Dynamic and Effective Sales Culture
Generally speaking, top performing sales teams ALWAYS do these four things better than their competitors:
- They spend more time interacting with high potential buyers and prospects
- They are more skillful at using a proven interactive sales process and are more credible and convincing when explaining their products, services and competitive advantages than their competitors
- They have a sales culture that has more practice, coaching and accountability
- Their Sales Training Team is more skilled and competent at ALL ASPECTS of training and following-up on all members of the Sales Team
Sounds simple, but executing it is anything but easy.
“I now realize we didn’t have a real sales culture at all before we started working with Dycoco. Our team now is focused and knows what to do and say to get results.We are MUCH BETTER Sales Coaches than before. The capability and potential of our Sales Trainers has improved much more than we ever thought possible.”
Elisa C. - Financial Services Sales Executive
There are obviously other elements that factor into sales results like product/service quality and price, convenience issues, barriers to changing suppliers, familiarity with current supplier etc. However, the two things a Sales Professional usually has control over is how much time he/she is going to speak with high potential buyers/clients and what he/she is going to say and do in that interaction. The best Sales People spend more time talking to people that can buy more of their products and services. This seems so obvious but thousands of companies ignore these simple indicators of success and ultimately this is why so many Sales People never reach their full potential.
Many sales executives get bluffed out into thinking more computer-based tools and account planning and forecasting processes is the answer. There is certainly nothing wrong with having a good CRM system and using planning processes that give management better visibility into the pipeline, but these tools rarely increase a sales person’s activity level and have virtually no impact on how skillfully the sales person communicates important things like competitive advantages, and differentiating factors from the competition.
From working with hundreds of sales organizations, we have learned that the vital elements of a high powered sales culture include:
- An intense focus on making sure every member of the sales team masters the ability to communicate the critical sales information that generates business
- A real commitment to using a proven consultative sales process that generates rapport, finds needs and tailors solutions
- A clear understanding of the transferable best practices that must become strengths of all members of the sales team
- A strong focus on coaching and training from Sales Managers so they don’t waste too much time on data analysis and looking at computer screens
- A method of finding and sharing success stories that highlight strong selling performance so that all members of the sales team can learn from one other’s success
- A serious commitment to build a talented and versatile Sales Training Team that gives Sales Executives a powerful ability to accelerate improvement in all aspects of the Sales Organization
- Compensation and incentives that reward the right things
Dycoco's approach toward helping sales teams transform is simple:
- Listen to and learn from Top Performers. Identify the transferable best practices that Sales People, Sales Managers and Sales Trainers are using to the rest of the team.
- Use Competency Thresholds to motivate Sales Managers to coach and train their teams. Make sales coaching activity far more measurable and visible.
- Build the skills, capabilities and flexibility of the Sales Training Team. Turn Sales Training into a powerful special ops delivery team that can train, coach, follow-up and co-manage when necessary both Sales People and Sales Managers.
- Help companies become more focused on practice, training drills, follow-up coaching and, in general, building a culture that believes in and is committed to steady, consistent improvement.
- We give Sales Executives a comprehensive plan to transform the Sales Team, the Sales Culture and the pace of improvement and help them execute it until their own team can execute without our help.
Simple, but not easy. We have learned how to execute these steps better and better through many projects with good, bad and ugly sales teams over the last 20 years. Our training and coaching processes are more rigorous and demanding than our competitors and Sales Teams love it.