As a sales leader, are you continually tired of being the one person who has to keep your sales team motivated? Does it always fall on your shoulders? Is it a never-ending cycle? Imagine if your salespeople could not only motivate themselves but motivate others too.
Well, it’s possible. Motivation comes from within, so you can help shape inner motivation by creating a selling culture that fosters it. And culture is shaped by values. When thinking about the values you can implement to create a high-performance selling culture, ask yourself:
- What are the values for securing a high-performance Salesforce?
- How can I motivate salespeople from within?
- What’s the root cause of interference to sales performance?
- How can I encourage a perpetuating cycle of ongoing sales learning and improvement?
“The best sales leaders encourage their teams to be leaders in their own right.”
Cultivating a value-based sales team
Cultivating sales leadership from your sales team is a key aspect to achieving the goal of having a high-performance team. However, some leaders fear giving their team empowerment, as their ego sees it as a threat to their own role in the team. That is not value-based leadership. It will not help your team grow.
Traditionally, leaders would take control of a situation and the team follows. However, in a more modern workspace, you can lead with values instead.
Let’s use the buying process as an example. Think about the overall goal of selling? Making someone buy something. Therefore, the prospect’s buying performance is more important than the salespersons selling performance, right? However, typically all the focus is on the sales performance.
The problem is, every sale involves two conversations: The conversation between the salesperson and the prospect, and then also, the internal buying conversation in the prospect’s head. That second conversation is imperative. If you don’t know what the prospect is thinking, then you’re on the back foot.
In order for the prospect to buy, they need to be clear internally, which is very often not the case after a sales meeting. They regularly don’t know what they want. The role of the salesperson, therefore, is to be the prospect’s decision coach. You’re not there to convince them, you’re there to help them make the correct decision. Empowering the salesperson to take on that role is vital in the sales journey.
Because the issue with modern-day selling is there is so much of everything. Prospects have too many choices and too many distractions. Therefore, it’s natural that they’ll have conflicting priorities and messy thoughts.
Instilling a coaching culture
You can combat this by instilling a coaching culture. A salesperson’s success is everyone’s success. Embed this idea in your culture. It’s a brilliant value to have within the team and helps every member of the team grow.
You want your salespeople to allow their natural selling process to take place and for them to allow the natural buying process to take place. Remember, it’s not about you. If the prospect makes a decision that you might not agree with, then recognise that it’s not you. It’s part of their buying process.
If you shift focus onto improving the buying process, instead of the selling process, you can begin to identify the ‘no-brainers’. The aces in the deck.
Once you have them, you’ll believe you can make a sale on every call. But don’t hold yourself accountable if it doesn’t happen. Learn from it.
A salesperson should be a learner. Not a teacher. Let them learn, encourage leadership, embed and enforce positive values, and empower them to not fear mistakes.
Always remember, prospects don’t make decisions for the reasons that the salesperson suggests – they make decisions for their own reasons. Prospects buy with the 3 C’s: Confidence, Choice, Clarity.
