4 Attributes of a High Performance Sales Culture

Develop High performing solution selling teams grow revenue 72% faster than their peers and are 58% more profitable than their peers.

Yet too many sales leaders struggle to create consistent and profitable growth. They have tried unsuccessfully to boost the morale and performance of their sales and service teams by tweaking sales compensation, adjusting sales territories, instituting common sales methodologies, developing additional sales tools, adding more sales reps, and providing solution selling training.

If your attempts at improved sales performance have failed to produce the desired results, maybe it’s time to look more closely at your sales culture – how the work gets done.

Here is what you should strive for as you seek to create a high performance sales culture that attracts and retains high performing solution selling sales reps:

1.  Set clear sales performance expectations
Each member of the sales team should have a clear and quantifiable idea of what constitutes high performance and a job well done. They should know how their success is measured and what specifically is required to reach individual and team targets.

2.  Create true accountability
Be sure you hold each team member accountable for clear and agreed-to results. This means that sales targets are transparent, fair, agreed upon, and just possible. It also means that those who are performing well deserve to be recognized and compensated for their contributions while ensuring that there are fair but real consequences for underperformers.

If you overlook substandard sales performance, your top talent will soon become discouraged. They will lose their motivation and the whole sales team will suffer. Disengaged sales employees are the ones who create disengaged clients.

3.  Develop strong sales leaders
Top sales talent respects sales leaders who empower them to do what it takes to be successful, remove obstacles, make effective decisions and adapt to market changes. Strong sales leaders solicit input from team members, welcome differing opinions and new ideas, answer questions about the company’s future, and provide clarity about the sales strategy and the role that sales plays in the company’s success. They make sure their sales team understands and aligns with the organization’s overall strategy.

4.  Learn from failures in context
No team succeeds without a few failures along the way. One key to a high performing sales culture is how you handle failures. As a sales leader, you need to focus on the positive but accept that much can be learned from failures. Rather than shrink from them, sales failures should be examined for what they can teach you. Then move on, all the wiser.

To learn more about a high performance sales culture, download How to Create a High Performance Sales Culture for Your Organization