How can sales managers help to create great sales cultures?
We know that when there is too little accountability on a sales team, several things can happen including:
- Low performers continue to be paid base salaries without producing minimum results
- Goals and expectations for actions and results are set but nothing happens when they are not achieved
- Salespeople generally continue to do what they’ve always done
- Salespeople know that as long as the lowest performing person on the team is not disciplined, they are safe and can perform at any level above that
- Managers can preach, rant, threaten, inspire, motivate, do whatever they want and no behaviors change
- Salespeople feel ‘safe’, ‘comfortable’, but unchallenged and uninspired
When there is too much accountability without any support or investment from managers, these things can happen:
- Salespeople are terminated left and right, and the culture becomes a ‘churn & burn’ environment
- Salespeople are ‘heads down’ and little cooperation, teaming, or sharing best practices is happening
- Salespeople know they are expendable and their efforts not valued
- Salespeople know the customers are not going to be treated much differently than they are being treated
- Good salespeople figure out what’s going on and leave to find better opportunities
- There’s lots of shaming, blaming, accusing, public humiliation being used by managers
In grad school, I did my doctoral dissertation on father-daughter relationships. Specifically I asked which parenting styles used by the father were most effective? The results found that fathers who demonstrated a combination of high expectations/demands of their daughters coupled with high expressions of affection, love, and support had daughters who had the highest levels of self esteem when their daughters reached college age.
This seemed intuitively true. I believe the same balance between high expectations of performance and lots of support is true for great managers as well. Research by Marcus Buckingham in “First Break All the Rules” bears this out.
It takes both high expectations, people being held accountable for their actions, coupled with a high level of investment to support each individual to build great sales cultures.
So, given all of this – how does a manager create the right balance?
Here are some tips:
On the High Expectations side:
- Set clear expectations – Make sure everyone knows what you expect – in terms of actions and behaviors, pipeline quality and quantity, and end results.
- Let everyone know the rules of the game – Rewards, incentives, compensation, and consequences are clear for everyone, and everyone has the same level playing field chance to succeed and win.
- Make sure the game is fair – No favoritism, preferential treatment, or rigging the game for a few individuals.
- Inspect what you expect – Know what people are doing. Monitor performance. Let your people know you are watching. Gather objective and subjective data and observe directly by being with your salespeople on sales calls as often as possible. Make sure your data is accurate and you’re measuring the right things.
- When people fail – provide consequences – When salespeople fail to perform, treat them as adults and hold them accountable. Enforce your consequences. Let non-performers go, even when they are the most beloved members of your team.
On the High Support side:
- Know what motivates each salesperson – take the time to personally find out what motivates each of your people because they are all different. Make sure they are receiving the kind of rewards and reinforcement that matters to them.
- Communicate that you care – Make sure each person knows that you are personally invested in their success and that you care whether or not they achieve their goals – both in sales and outside the office.
- Know each person’s strengths and skill gaps – Take time to identify what they do well and help them leverage those things. Identify the most important skill gaps that will make the biggest difference in their performance if they improve.
- Spend time coaching individually – Approach each rep differently. Experienced reps need very different things from managers than new ones do. Make sure each time you coach, the salesperson leaves with a new skill or idea to try or with a new powerful perspective or mindset that is propelling them into action.
- Coach on a regular basis – so that all your salespeople know you are watching, so you build accountability into your investment of coaching. Frequency intervals can vary for experienced and inexperienced reps, but stay on a regular schedule.
When you as a manager get serious about supporting, coaching, motivating, and knowing each of your team members AND draw the line on non-performance when the sales rep fails to live up to the expectations of the expectations you set, you are achieving the balance. You are on your way to building a sales culture that will attract great talent and provide top-notch results.