Unleash the Power of Your Team

Is your team competing with each other—or the market? In this video, I share how collaboration can unlock your next growth wave.

Don't forget to check out last week's top tip: Being Comfortable with Change!

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If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

Is your sales team competing against each other or are they competing against the market?

I was interviewing a top performer on stage a few years ago at a sales kickoff, and I asked him how he was outselling his own team members by a massive, an order of magnitude more, and he said, hey, I trust the team around me. And I dove into that with him a little bit more, and he had a sense of clarity and a very strong communication protocol with everybody on his broader team. Now those included implementation specialists, customer service specialists, his accounts receivable department. It included warehouse people, delivery drivers, product specialists and engineers. His team was vast, but it was no different than the team member running the smallest territory in his business. He trusted them and he built a culture of trust.

Everybody on that team knew exactly what the rules of engagement were. There were no gray areas. Everybody had a role to play, and everybody knew how to communicate with each other.

Now, I was thinking about this in terms of salespeople and sales leaders in our community, and I noticed that many sales leaders don't communicate the culture of trust very well with their teams. In other words, they leave a lot of gray areas. They leave gray areas when it comes to commission plans. They leave gray areas when it comes to splits, account splits, or territory splits. Who gets what deal? There are gray areas in the rules of engagement between a BDR hand-off with an account manager and sales engineering. And all of those things need to be cleaned up so you create a culture of trust.

And the same thing with individual salespeople. Salespeople don't communicate the role the manager is going to play when they show up in a sales meeting. They're disappointed. And then they don't trust to bring that manager in again. But did they communicate what they wanted the manager or the leader to do? Likely not.

Salespeople need to communicate what they're looking for from an engineering team or an implementation team. If your implementation fails or has a false start, is it because you didn't communicate the rules of engagement or download to that implementation specialist the nuances of the customer?

So think about building a culture of trust and outline and communicate clearly what the expectations are, what the follow up will be, and what the rules of engagement are going to be at every step along the way. And in doing so, you too will outperform your peers.