How do you create a high performing sales team?

I think it starts with creating a winning culture.

I’d define a winning culture as one that empowers sellers with the training, tools and enablement necessary to do their job – one that holds everyone to account using a universally recognized set of performance metrics and KPIs – and one that celebrates success publicly with recognition and reward.

This is a great question. It also starts with defining what we mean by high performing teams.

Historically, sales teams haven’t been ‘teams’. They are individuals who are hired to be self-starting, self-reliant, competitive etc and who are all given individual sales targets. There’s not a lot of team about it. So, how you create a high performing sales individuals is different to how you create high performing sales teams and the actions you take are different. I think there’s a real appetite and opportunity now to create high performing sales TEAMS.

So, if I look at that angle, it’s about eg how can we leverage data and insights together, how do we learn together and from each other, how do we ensure that sales people are incentivised and motivated to actually help each other. If I am making my target, traditionally, it makes little or difference to me whether the rest of the team is making theirs or not. Maybe it even makes me the hero.

What about creating a climate where teams where I can’t completely succeed unless everyone is succeeding (or at least close)? A lot of evidence looking at success suggests a rockstar team outperforms a team of rockstars – just look at most pro team sports. You can have the best players but unless they play as a team they won’t be champions.

I was recently a guest on a podcast talking about this – you can listen to it by searching We Not Me on your podcast app or https://www.alatebusinessgrowth.com/podcast-guest-interview.html – Three things sales teams need to do to be more effective.

I’m looking forward to seeing the other comments here, there’s so much to share and learn.

Hey @jordandaoudi!

Sam Jacobs loved your question and answered it on the Sales Hacker Podcast!

It’s at timestamp 6:39. 🙂

https://www.saleshacker.com/sales-mailbag-sam-jacobs-podcsast/