A top priority for sales managers, after increasing sales and revenue of course, is often to create a high-performing sales culture within the organization. Every sales leader wants a productive, efficient, and effective sales team that can hit quota. And let’s face it – in today’s competitive business environment, sales organizations are increasingly chasing more aggressive goals with greater pressure to over-achieve. But what does a high-performing sales culture even look like? And why is it important?
A majority of B2B organizations struggle with sales rep performance:
- Only 1/3 of sales people meet or exceed quota (Aberdeen Group)
- Sales productivity is the #1 challenge for 65% of B2B organizations (The Bridge Group)
- Most sales reps spend more than 50 full days away from core selling activities each year (Domo)
Research from Harvard Business Review indicates that “high-performing sales cultures are characterized by an ability to align (gain clarity on vision, strategy, and shared employee behaviors), execute (move in the agreed-upon direction with minimal friction), and renew (continuously improve at a pace that exceeds competitors)”. Collectively, these factors encompass ‘corporate culture’. This corporate health is important because the efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of an organization’s sales force has a direct and significant impact on revenue.
The following 6 characteristics are key to creating a high-performing sales culture.
1) A Data-Driven Mindset
The term ‘data-driven’ refers to what data you collect, how you collect it, and then what you do with it once you’ve got it. Sales leaders have to track the right metrics and then be able to gain actionable insights from that information. Sales organizations can improve sales performance and derive value from KPIs such as conversion rates, call rates, win rates, marketing collateral usage, average deal size, sales cycle length, and deal response time. These data points are essential for any sales team to understand what factors impact successes, how to deliver the right content at the right time, and what changes will improve performance. But don’t just gather data for data’s sake. Before embarking on any metric mission, make sure you have a solid understanding of what you are measuring, why it’s important, and how it affects your strategy and sales processes.
2) Dedication to Continuous Training and Coaching
Less than 45% of companies have a formal sales training process. However, continuous training can yield up to 50% higher net sales per sales rep. To be top reps, your team needs to be challenged, educated, and supported through the sales process. You don’t go to school to get a degree in selling – sales reps rely on training, guidance, and coaching to learn how to sell and how to do so effectively. For this reason, sales leaders can’t just focus on the outcomes of the sales organization (phone calls, emails, leads, revenue); they also need to invest in the inputs. Your sales teams need to be trained on the selling space and market, the different buyer personas, and your products, as well as on what to say, what content to provide, and how to steer the prospect through the sales cycle. These buckets of information change over time, so your sales training programs need to be updated regularly.
Tools such as sales playbooks allow sales leaders to provide their teams with just-in-time coaching and best practices to ensure they have what they need to further the deal. Information such as talk tracks, training materials, kill sheets, and persona-based selling tips can be instantly accessible to reps for any given sales situation.
3) Healthy Competition
Gamification introduces a healthy level of competition to your sales team; it takes the mechanics, concepts, and addicting elements of games and interactivity and applies them to real-world activities. According to Salesforce.com, 71% of companies saw an 11%-50% increase in measured sales performance after implementing gamification in their organizations. In the same report, 90% of companies reported that their gamification initiatives were successful. Research from the Aberdeen Group reiterated the success of gamification, showing that 31% more first-year sales reps achieve quota when supported with game mechanics.
If implemented correctly, gamification educates, influences, and rewards the behavior of a sales organization. Seismic’s dashboards and leaderboards leverage gamification to give insight into sales rep performance, motivate sales teams, and share best practices. Sales leaders can see which reps are sharing particular pieces of content with prospects, how frequently content is being consumed, and whether individuals need to pick up the pace relative to their peers when it comes to using content.
4) Shared Goals
Everybody in the sales organization, from the VP down to the individual sales rep, should share a common vision with buy-in from all employees. What is it that the organization is trying to achieve? What is the end goal? Unfortunately, more than half of B2B executives indicate that their employees don’t understand their company’s strategy, according to research from Harvard Business Review.
Sales leaders need to outline a consistent workflow and then set sales objectives around those activities or related to specific sales goals. Companies that follow a defined workflow are 33% more likely to be high performers. Shared goals also help to ensure transparency and accountability within the organization.
5) A Collaborative Environment
According to Gallup, 70% of people working in sales feel disengaged from their work, costing US companies over $300 billion per year in lost productivity. And with more sales reps working remotely than ever before, your sales force may feel disconnected and may be missing out on valuable feedback on their performance, as well as the opportunity to learn from their peers.
Collaboration encourages sales reps to work with each other instead of against each other, leveraging best practices and in turn, increasing efficiency. The 20/60/20 rule says that about 20% of your sales team are top performers who often meet or exceed quota. That leaves a majority of your sales team with room for improvement. Sales people trying to hit quota will, or at least should, look to those top performers for guidance and work to turn best practices into habits.
6) Access to the Right Tools
A modern selling strategy requires modern sales tools – invest time and money in the resources to make your sales reps successful. Empower your sales team with the right tools to help them do their job efficiently and effectively. Research from SiriusDecisions shows that sales enablement tool spending has jumped 69% in the last 2 years, triggered by the realization that companies can make individual sales contributors significantly more productive without a heavy investment.
Sales enablement technologies, such as Seismic, aim to align marketing processes and goals and then arm sales teams with the tools and content to improve sales execution and drive revenue. Often times, optimized sales performance comes down to just streamlining workflow and eliminating unnecessary or superfluous tasks, and sales enablement tools have a major impact on reducing the day-to-day ‘noise’ for sales reps. Lastly, remember that a higher-performing sales team means more revenue is being generated!
