Written by Sean McPheat | 
Creating a vibrant and engaging sales culture is pivotal in driving team cohesion and performance within any organisation.
While sales training courses can equipt teams with essential skills, it’s the shared values and environment that truly elevate performance.
In this blog, we will delve into the nuances of creating an engaging sales culture, exploring 22 practical strategies to cultivate an environment where teams thrive and excel.
Let’s begin with a basic breakdown of sales culture and what it entails.
Before you can understand what goes into creating an engaging sales culture, you must understand what it is and why it matters.So…
A company’s sales culture involves the shared values, beliefs, and behaviours that define its sales team.
It encompasses everything from how salespeople interact with each other and with customers to the overall attitude and approach to the sales process.
Every sales team has a culture, whether they realise it or not. In this section, we’ll discuss the differences between a positive sales team culture and a toxic one.
A positive sales team culture offers numerous benefits to all team members and the company as a whole. The following are some of the top reasons to prioritise a positive sales culture:
Great things can happen when a company has a positive sales team culture. Conversely, a toxic sales culture can make the workplace, well, toxic for everyone involved.
Here are some signs that your company might need to make some changes to its culture:
If you see signs of a toxic sales culture at your company, you might be wondering, “How can I change my sales culture?”
It’s important to note that a positive and engaging sales culture doesn’t just happen. It takes work and dedication from leaders and managers. The following are 23 of the best ways you can build a successful sales culture:
The first step to creating an engaging sales culture is encouraging open, multi-directional communication.
As a sales team leader or manager, you likely feel perfectly comfortable communicating with your team. Do they feel the same about communicating with you, though?
Make it clear that you want to hear from team members if they have ideas, suggestions, concerns, etc.
Establishing a positive sales culture is hard if your team doesn’t know what they’re working toward or what’s expected of them.
Set aside time regularly to focus on goal-setting. Encourage your staff to set individual and team goals, too.
Team goals are critical when it comes to fostering a sense of team collaboration. A positive workplace culture involves team members working together to achieve common goals and help the company succeed.
In addition to setting shared goals, there are many other ways you can promote team collaboration. For example, you can pair team members together based on their strengths and weaknesses to create opportunities for employees to learn from each other.
Learning from each other is a great way for sales reps to build stronger workplace connections and become more engaged. However, you should also provide more formal training and development options.
Schedule regular training sessions, focusing on different skills and aspects of the sales process, to help team members stay motivated and ensure they’re consistently working to get better at their jobs.
Do your best to cater to different learning styles with your training materials, too. Some team members may learn better through role-playing or more hands-on activities rather than sitting through a lecture, for example.
Instead of harping on team members who fall short of their quotas and miss the mark, use positive reinforcement to encourage more of the behaviours you’d like to see from your reps.
Celebrate those who meet or exceed their quotas, of course, but focus on other types of achievements as well.
For example, has a team member closed more deals than they have in the past, even if they didn’t quite meet their quota? They deserve a shout-out as well.
When you focus on positive reinforcement and celebrating the behaviours and outcomes you want to see more of, you naturally promote a more positive work environment. Do your best to focus on the positives instead of dwelling on the negatives, and encourage your staff to do the same.
This doesn’t mean you have to ignore serious problems, but it does mean you should do your best to create an uplifting workplace where people actually want to show up and do their best each day.
In a positive workplace with a supportive sales culture, team members aren’t afraid to take risks and try new things. Encourage your team to be innovative and creative. Let them know it’s okay if they try something new and it doesn’t work out exactly as they’d hoped.
You’ll be amazed at what your sales reps can accomplish when they feel comfortable thinking outside of the box.
If you want your team members to be engaged and positive, make sure you’re leading by example. Be the kind of salesperson you want your reps to be.
Communicating with customers is a critical part of every salesperson’s job. Not all sales teams are as customer-centric as they should be, and can naturally deliver good customer service skills.
During training and development sessions, emphasise the importance of putting the customer first, focusing on their needs, and providing solutions to their problems.
The more focused your team is on taking care of the customer, the more sales they’re likely to make and the more productive they’re likely to be.
There is no such thing as a perfect leader. The best leaders, though, continuously seek feedback from their team members and strive to become better. Let your team know that you want to hear from them and want to see how you can improve.
Consider using a suggestion box or a virtual platform that allows people to leave comments and offer insights into how you can be a better leader. Take these messages to heart, too, and do your best to make changes wherever you can.
To create an engaging sales culture, you can’t let just anyone onto your team. Be selective about the people you hire and vet candidates carefully.
Take your time to select the right people — those who seem optimistic, enthusiastic, innovative, and eager to learn. Remember, too, that a person who is coachable and willing to work hard can often be better for your team than someone who has years of sales experience.
Do your best to hire slowly and deliberately. When you’re short-staffed, it can be tempting to hire the first people who respond to your job ad.
If you take the time to vet candidates and conduct thorough interviews, you’ll be more likely to hire people who are assets to your team and are likely to stick around long-term (which is better for the company than hiring someone who jumps ship a few months later).
A little healthy competition and gamification are great ways to boost motivation and light a fire under your team. If you want your sales reps to be engaged, give them a little push by creating a sales contest and offering some fun and exciting rewards (bonuses, gift cards, a chance to leave early, etc.).
When you’re evaluating performance and checking in on your employees, make sure you’re focusing on the progress they’ve made rather than demanding perfection at all times.
Celebrate the positive changes people have made, even if they still have a ways to go before they become superstar sales reps. When you prioritise progress, you keep people motivated and encourage them to keep pushing themselves to be better.
When someone makes a mistake or falls short of a goal, use that as a teaching opportunity.
Instead of focusing solely on what they did wrong, discuss what they can do differently in the future to avoid making the same mistake. Highlight what they did well, too, so they know what to repeat moving forward.
A healthy sales team culture involves accountability.
An accountability culture might look like making sure sales quotas are met — and if they’re not met, discussing what went wrong so you can increase the chances of meeting them during the next month or quarter.
It might also look like talking to team members who are consistently underperforming and creating a sales plan to help them improve.
The Agile philosophy emphasises flexibility, continuous improvement, and collaboration. Adopt these principles and incorporate them into your own management/leadership strategy wherever you can.
One example of how you can adopt agile principles includes holding daily stand-up meetings to go over everyone’s accomplishments from the previous day, discuss what they plan to achieve today, and figure out what changes they need to make to ensure they achieve a particular goal.
Data-driven teams are in a better position to succeed than those who never pay attention to the numbers. Make sure you’re paying attention to essential metrics like conversion rate, churn rate, average deal size, and quota attainment. When setting goals, base them on these numbers to ensure ongoing improvement and give people specific targets to work toward.
Take a look at this article if you want to transition to a more data-driven, analytical sales approach: The Power of Sales Forecasting and Predictive Analytics
It’s easy to get hung up on what’s going wrong and forget about everything that is going right. In many cases, our brains are wired to focus on the negative instead of the positive.
Do your best not to dwell on issues, though. Use them as jumping-off points to brainstorm plans and set goals for the future.
For example, say your team has fallen short of its quarterly sales goal. Instead of spending an hour talking about how they failed, use that time to come up with ideas for how you can meet or exceed this upcoming quarter’s goal.
You shouldn’t ignore your problems, but you also shouldn’t let them take up too much valuable brain (or meeting) space.
Whether you’re running a competition or just want to give your sales team some extra motivation, make sure you’re offering incentives people actually want.
The easiest way to find out what kind of incentives your team wants? Ask them.
Give them a list of options that you know you can offer (don’t promise a raise or bonus if you can’t follow through!), and let them rank them from least to most desired.
If you need help coming up with the right incentives for your team, take a look at these 18 Sales Incentive Ideas To Drive Performance.
Resist the urge to micromanage your team.
Especially when you run a small team, it can be tempting to hover and check in frequently. Do your best to give people space to practise, make mistakes, and learn as they go, though.
Let your team have some breathing room and let them know that you’re always available if they have questions, concerns, etc.
As you begin making changes to your team to create a more positive and engaging sales culture, you might notice that some team members are resistant. They might have negative attitudes or complain frequently without offering solutions.
Talk to these people and give them an opportunity to turn things around. If they continue to create a toxic environment, though, you’ll need to let them go so the rest of the team can grow and thrive.
As you can see, you can take a lot of different steps to develop a winning sales culture at your company. Whether you implement all the sales culture ideas shared above or just pick and choose your favourites, remember that consistency is key.
Your sales culture will not change overnight. It’ll take consistent effort on your part and your team’s part to make positive changes and move the needle in the right direction.
Be sure to ask for feedback regularly as you work on nurturing and building sales team culture, too.
Asking for feedback shows your team that you care and want to help them succeed. It also shows that you want to create a more collaborative environment and are open to tips and suggestions for how you can improve.
Now that you know how to build a sales culture that is positive and engaging, is it time to make some changes to how you run your team?
As a Sales Training Provider it’s something we’re passionate about supporting and offers numerous resources that can help – like our popular Selling Skills Training and Sales Management Training.
Alternatively, get in touch to discuss your requirements.
Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Sales Training
Updated on: 5 April, 2024
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