What Is the Culture of Your Sales Team?

team

No factor indicates more about the success or failure of your sales team than the quality of the culture. Positive cultures promote cooperation and innovation, leading directly to bigger sales and long-term business. Negative cultures, by contrast, lead to infighting, turnover, and lost opportunities. Unfortunately, actually observing, analyzing, and defining the culture of your sales team is a notoriously tricky process.

As you start to take a closer look, focus on these factors:

  • Respect – Is everyone on your team treated with respect and fairness in all situations? Your team should push each other, but they should do so in a way that acknowledges differences and difficulties.
  • Integrity – Would your co-workers, colleagues, and competitors describe your sales team as having integrity? If not, it makes it difficult for people to trust you, clients/customers included.
  • Adaptability – Has your team evolved with the times or remained rigidly committed to tradition? You don’t have to operate on the cutting edge in order to stay current with changes in business.
  • Commitment – Does your team always focus on the end goals or get wrapped up in petty details? Unsuccessful sales teams often fail because of shortsightedness.
  • Teamwork – Do the members of your sales team communicate, collaborate, and facilitate? Teams that work against each other rarely accomplish their goals.
  • Engagement – Is your sales staff eager and motivated or simply showing up for work? Don’t expect a team of disengaged sales professionals to go above and beyond.
  • Responsibility – When something goes wrong, do the offending parties take responsibility or pass the blame? When no one is held accountable, teams usually descend into dysfunction.
  • Growth – Does your team work to make itself smarter, faster, and stronger, on both an individual and group level? You can’t expect the skills/strategies you rely on today to work forever.
  • Communication – Does information flow freely throughout your team or run into roadblocks? No team can succeed when operating with bad information.
  • Decisiveness – Is your team able to act decisively? Without bold, committed decision making, it is difficult to get motivated to sell.
  • Strategy – Do you operate in a strategic way or a reactive way? The best sales teams come up with a plan which then informs everything they do.

It’s easy to assume that the culture of your sales team is one thing when in reality it’s quite different. Analyze your culture in the context of each of the criteria listed above, and you might be surprised at what’s revealed. If a change is in order, access a pool of sales talent that is ready to make a positive impact on day one. Contact Artemis Consultants.

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