4 Steps to a Sales Team You Can Be Proud Of

Are you truly proud of the way your sales team go about their work and the results they deliver for the company?

How about the way they treat your customers – their standards with regards to ethics, professionalism and personal attitude?

Are you proud of the way they represent your business to the outside world?

Just to make sure, let’s see how they stand up in these 4 areas;

  • Ethics

  • Professionalism

  • Commercial Awareness

  • Attitude

Ethics

If your sales team continue to treat customers the way they’re treating them right now – which includes the way they prospect for business, the things they promise during their presentation, the prices they charge – can you be sure that you or your company won’t end up in the newspapers, on the end of a Facebook hate campaign or hauled into court?

Recently a UK newspaper – The Mail on Sunday – decided to expose the prospecting tactics of a UK energy supplier’s sales team and the way they were trained to exploit customer’s fear with regards to switching suppliers.

It’s all too easy to think “this would never happen to us” – but I doubt anyone being filmed secretly in that expose ever thought it would happen to them either (if they’d ever actually thought about it at all) – and in an environment like sales, where people are continuously driven to hit targets and beat the competition – it’s incredibly easy to lose sight of the destination your current actions are leading you towards.

With that in mind, I reckon it’s not a bad idea for a sales team – every now and again – to simply ask themselves;

“Is this really the right thing to do?”

Professional

How do you measure professionalism?

To my mind, professionalism is a bit of an umbrella term that sales managers and their teams dump everything underneath without ever really considering the detail or deeper meaning.

One of my favourite methods for working out what it means for salespeople, is to get them to consider the two perceptions;

1) How you want customers to speak about you before you meet them and

2) How you want customers to speak about you after you’ve met them 

With regards to professionalism, I thinks it’s a good idea to regularly start the sales process with the question;

“If I was the Customer – Would I buy off Me?”

Commercial Awareness

Nobody is naïve enough to think that sales is just about building relationships and planting seeds (are they?) – every sales team needs to be aware that volume, profit, new customers and repeat business – are the only reasons they exist.

Nobody can afford to give all their profits away by hiring nice coffee drinking chatty types who like to travel.

Just as an aside – “awareness teams” are something the marketing department put together. If your work doesn’t eventually create an order, a commercial agreement or some form of revenue stream for your business – then you’re either not actually in a real sales job – or there’s a high chance that you won’t be in one for very much longer.

So, sales people need to constantly ask this question – and then deliver the required results once they’ve discovered the answers;

“How am I currently measured by my employers and customers?”

Attitude

I can not state highly enough how important attitude is when it comes to the success of all great salespeople.

This is not the same as having attitude – I’m talking about work ethic, empathy and belief.

Attitude is the passion and commitment you decide to come to work with – it’s how you interact with your colleagues and your customers – and it’s the feeling that you generate inside every room that you enter.

It’s positivity and optimism mixed with commerciality and realism.

It’s what businesses hire and what customers like to buy from.

Note well – going that extra mile for your employers and your customers is the enormous difference between actually having a sales career and just working in a succession of sales jobs.

We Should Feel Proud of Our Sales Teams

Each and every year I meet, train and speak to thousands of salespeople – and I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t consider the four areas above when I’m spending time with them.

Some you’d hire as soon as they walked into an interview – and then feel lucky to have on your team – and some you definitely would not.

If you were a customer, you’d be delighted to have some of them as your account manager – and there are some that you wouldn’t want anywhere near your affairs – period.

But every now and again – an entire sales team stands out as being truly exceptional.

Every now and then – here at Varda Kreuz Towers – a member of the team walks back into the office after a day’s training and says;

“They – Were – AMAZING!”

And we thought those teams deserved to be recognised.

So – earlier in the year, we decided to create an award for teams that not only ticked all the boxes listed above – but regularly exceeded requirements – and constantly amazed the Varda Kreuz team.

We didn’t want it to be something people could enter or put a name forward for – we just decided that some of the sales team’s that we come into contact with really deserved a little recognition for the incredible work they did.

And I’m delighted to announce, that this week we decided which teams were going to receive the first “A Sales Team to Be Proud Of” Awards. It’s not something we’re just giving to anyone.

In fact I can’t envisage ever awarding more than 10 of these a year.

You see, this isn’t a marketing ploy to turn all our future and existing customers into immediate superstars – it’s not a certificate for completing a sales workshop.

We’re giving this to sales teams when we’ve decided we can put our name next to theirs – and let me tell you, that isn’t something I do lightly – not at all.

They’re free to display it on their website, emails, letterheads and social media outlets.

Some might just choose to take a little quiet satisfaction from the fact that the way they do their job and the way they treat their customers has been recognised by a group of people who know what they’re talking about.

Either way – they all deserve the award and I’m delighted for them.

Of course, you don’t need that little logo to be proud of your sales team.

My best advice would be to spend your time asking them to act in a way that makes you feel proud to have your name associated with theirs, after that – if they’ve come to work with the right attitude – you’ll probably find everything else just falls into place naturally.

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