Creating sales values for a team has a profound impact on sales performance, culture and attainment. Winning sales values come from the heart and soul of a team and when done right represents the best of the best. It unifies, aligns and motivate teams to do the best work of their lives. Here are three questions to think about as you embark on the journey of creating your own team’s values:
- What is my team doing well that we want to reinforce and repeat?
- What actions or behaviors do we want to change to improve our performance and make the team better?
- What are some of our team’s performance and execution expectations?
Having an entire team, along with its extended team members, rally around key selling principles and values results in better win-rate and bigger deals. Shared values create team camaraderie. Everyone shares more and everyone is mentoring and helping each other mode. Front-line managers who prioritize the creation of sales values will not only experience better execution and attainment but will also more loyalty and retention. Create Sales Values As A Team The task of creating a set of values for the sales team is not a single-person job. It’s a team effort. As the sales manager, we can’t hand down a list of values to our people and expect them to follow. If we want the team to really engage with the values, we need to give them a role and a voice. Use a weekly call to brainstorm or use an in person quarterly business review (QBR) to come up with winning sales values together. Make coming up with values inclusive and fun. After collating feedback, shift into brainstorming mode to prioritize and brand the sales values to fit the team’s culture. Look for words that are at the core of who you are and what you do. Then turn the words into a sales aid that can be easily distributed. You know you have a winner when your sales value brand or image is pinned up in the desks and cubes of the salespeople because they appreciate it and depend on it. Write Down Your Sales Values Getting our sales values documented and shared with sales teams propels a winning sales culture. Values are what salespeople learn when they are first onboarded and ramped. They keep salespeople focused on doing the right things. They inform the sales process. The sales management load is made easy, because managers can rely on the sales values to push alignment, peer coaching and mentoring. The key to this powerful alignment is to have clear messages that are understood and repeated over and over. Reinforce Values Once we establish our sales values, the next step is to make them stick. Do not assume that “if you build it, they will come.” We need to fully embrace the sales values and make them a core part of our sales culture. This will take time and continuous reinforcement. We need to have a strategy to integrate them with our team cadence, sales events, communications, coaching, team huddles, and onboarding. Repetition and more repetition is critical to making the values part of your team’s sales DNA. Have fun creating your sales values and let us know what you come up with as you work with your teams. The following is a partial chapter excerpt from the book “SalesHood: How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Sales Teams To Succeed” written by Elay Cohen.
