5 Qualities of a Healthy Sales Team

Introduction

A healthy team is a collection of individuals that consistently works together to achieve their objectives, propel progress and have fun doing it. A healthy team can accomplish far more than any sole individual contributor. But how do you build a healthy team?

First, consider how you, the individual, gets healthy. We take supplements, kick bad habits, cut carbs, improve our sleep, read self help and listen to podcasts. We journal at night. We meditate in the morning. Some partake in cold plunges. Others sweat it out in the sauna. The cures that come from a raw diet is preached and the explorations of mushroom induced awareness is sought after. We run laps and laps on treadmills and convince our friends to join our crossfit cult. An exhausting list of options exist within the $5.6 trillion health and wellness industry all aimed to better our health.

In our quest for personal wellness, we meticulously craft routines to ensure our bodies and minds are in optimal condition. Yet, in the busy world of business, amidst strategies, targets, and bottom lines, we can overlook a vital entity deserving of similar care and attention: the sales team.

Just as we strive to cultivate a healthy lifestyle for ourselves, nurturing a strong and resilient sales team requires deliberate effort. And this effort is worth taking due to the important role a sales team is responsible for: revenue. The sales team responsibility is to covert opportunities into cash. They are absolutely critical to an organization. Each sales team, like a unique individual, possesses its own strengths, weaknesses, and potential for growth. Just as we tailor our self-care routines to suit our specific needs, we must invest in strategies to foster the health and vitality of our sales teams.

In this article I will review 5 characteristics of a healthy sales team. I invite you to use this as a wellness check for your organization. From establishing structure and processes to devising plans and taking strategic action, we'll delve into the essential qualities that contribute to a high performing sales team.

Teams vs Committees

Before jumping directly in to the make-up of healthy sales team, let’s make a distinction. A team differs from a work group, assembly or committee.

Said simply, a team is responsible and accountable to the end results. A team has shared goals and desired outcomes. A committee or a work group is an assembly of people that have interests that go beyond the group. The requirement in a committee is participation. Their outside perspective makes them valuable to the group which favors multiple views. Their goal is to offer up insights and collaborate but the end results are the responsibility of someone else. Work groups and committees are often formed for a short term project or to gather data to help a different group make a final decision. Work groups have their place in business and can provide value but that is not what we are discussing today. We are talking about a team. A unit that comes together regularly to align on goals and collaborate on the approach to get there. A result not met is a collective failure of the team. Their work together is to deliver results.

5 Qualities of a Healthy Sales Team

Structure
A successful sales team will be structured in a way that complements the organization. We are responsible to put our team members in a position to succeed and the structure of a sales team is critical to reaching the end result. Does your sales team generate leads or is that a marketing function? Why? Do you use a Sales Rep to book an appointment and a separate Business Development Manager to close the sale? How are your geographical territories divided? Do you sell to different customer types using account managers with varying skills sets? Do you have a dedicated resource for you most important accounts? Is compensation commission based?

Your business, the total resources, customer needs and product technicality will determine the structure that is best for your organization. Whatever is decided, that structure needs to aid in creating clear roles and responsibilities while supporting the primary task of generating orders. If administration work is taking away from getting in-front of customers would adding a sales administrator help? Do tedious paperwork processes need automated so we can get back to selling faster? How we work matters. Be aware of the structure of your organization and change anything that gets in the way of a team members primary responsibility. To find these stucks, shadow your team and practice empathy. Be tough on anything that competes with the primary task you really want the sales team focusing on and explore how changes to the structure could help.

Strategy
The strategy driving the sales decisions, prospects and offers being pursued by your sales team represents the synergy between the front line action and the business roadmap. In short, how does your sales strategy overlap with the companies vision for the future? It is extremely important that the types of business and orders being pursued aligns with the overall goals of the organization. The best teams carry out a specific business function, in this case revenue, that support the broader objectives of the company. This type of harmony creates clarity in objectives and enables team members to be self sufficient. This strategy will create the ethos of your sales team. It will create cross collaboration with marketing to ensure that strategy is being carried out externally as well. A sign your sales team is healthy is when the organization’s overall strategy makes its way into your sales team meetings. When that strategy leverages the efforts of other departments.

The strategy will answer the “why” of a sales teams question. Why are we pursuing these prospects? Why are we offering this sale? Why are we releasing this product? It will force you to define how the action being taken supports a bigger initiative, specifically. The strategy can be helpful to create the type of behavior you believe the sales team needs to be successful. For example, part of the strategy of a sales team is to be solution seekers. This needs announced early and often. All sales team members should be constantly reprogramming their brains to be turning over every rock to find solutions. Problems presented should quickly have solutions to consider as well. A sales team is a not an awareness committee. It isn’t enough to point out a problem or challenge. This team is responsible for solutions. By making “solution seeking” an aspect of your strategy you are creating the ability to bring up this important quality often within the team environment. The strategy allows you highlight the characteristics you want your team to embody.

Process
A sales process outlines the steps a potential customers takes from becoming a lead, to a qualified prospect to a closed customer. Nurturing this journey is a salesperson’s responsibility. Their job is to steward the relationship of the customer through these phases.

We often trick ourselves into thinking sales is about forcing a product onto someone or relentlessly refusing to take no for an answer. We associate sales with sharks. However, sales success comes from solving a customers problem. Success isn’t about tricking a victim. Instead success is found by continually searching for customers with a problem you can solve, pitching an offer and making the ask. Closing a sales can be the output of a following a repeatable sales process. The more often we swing the bat, the more the odds of a hitting a homerun increases.

There isn’t one single sales process that works for all companies. They are somewhat unique to your offering and services. However, The best sales team know their process. They know the steps and exactly how many there are. They understand how the different aspects of the organization support the sales process. The understand the value in listening to a client and understanding their problems. They know that features need delicately shown by proving how the clients problems will be solved and the benefit. They understand the cycle most customers go through and the objections that may surface during. They know the sales process and where their clients are within in.

Is your sales process defined? Can the team recite the steps of the sales process and why they are important for a customer? Can they give success examples of when the process is followed? Can they recount times it was not, resulting in a missed sale? If your sales process is well thought out it will be reiterated within you CRM. It will be spoken of often during sales team meetings and your team will refer to the various stages a prospect or client is in. If the sales process is not showing up regularly in your team meetings and 1-on-1 discussions you likely don’t have a formed sales process. You have something in your head that differs from what is in the teams head. Spend the time to relaunch your sales process and ensure it is integrated into the documentation and tools. Be aware of how your clients and potential clients fit into the sales process and ensure metric sharing around the sales process is integrated deeply within the organization.

Planning
Planning is a critical component of achieving our goals. On a sales team, in order to hit the target or quota, we must have a plan to get there. Not because things go according to that plan. They rarely do. Instead, planning shows us a potential path for success. By simply having a plan, we then know when we are going off course. It helps outline where surprises could be hiding and an ideal roadmap to take. Teams that plan are more equipped to know when a pivot or change is needed. By planning, the team is exercising their ability to determine a path of least resistance in that moment. Even when the plan breaks down, the act of having a plan prepares us for what needs to be modified in the moment. If we train our teams to always be winging it we aren’t actually preparing them best on how to react to a myriad of potential outcomes. When the outcome is poor, more often than not, so was the planning.

Perhaps the biggest component of planning is learning. Planning gives us an excuse to review the past. To think what we could have done differently in the past. A team that collectively learns from mistakes is sharing the insights for better future success. Is your team taking time to review the success and failures to grow the collective brain? Do you sit and discuss, even role play, the potential options to reach your largest objectives? All successful teams have a way to learn through past experiences and have a regular practice of doing so within their planning.

Action
At the end of the day, success in a sales team comes in the form of doing. The best sales teams get after it. We can have the perfect process, structure and planning in place and still miss our sales quotas. This is because you need to pound the pavement. Dial and smile. Ring doorbells. Whether it is proactively following up with leads, moving customers onto the next sales process phase, cold calling, sending DMs, canvasing or going door to door - outreach is critical. We cannot wait for business to come to us. We must ensure our company and products are top of mind. The way you do that is you evangelize. You incessantly scream from the top of the mountain about the value of your brand and the solutions your products solve. You don’t wait for the phone to ring, you dial. A successful sales team dedicates a majority of their time to action. They recognize they hold a solution to a customers problem and as long as they aren’t being proactive problems aren’t being solved. A successful sales team will guard their calendars from unnecessary meetings or competing agendas. They wouldn’t dare risk taking away precise time to be in front of a customer.

Is your sales team driven by action? It is if you have to slow your team down. You want a sales team chomping at the bit too talk to customers. If you are having to trigger or order up the action with your team instead of asking them to wait it might be time to re-invigorate the members by reminding them the department that is responsible for outbound action. It should feel as if the team wants to rush through planning so they can get in front of customers. That is a good problem to have because It is easier to teach sales people the value in good preparation than it is to teach them how to be proactive.

Summary

A list of qualities a sales team should demonstrate could generate pages of responses. Just as there is not a single way to loose weight or exercise to build a healthy body, there is not a single blueprint to build a healthy sales team. However, if you want to perform a health check on your sales team, then review the 5 characteristics outlined in this article. If you can’t define exactly how your structure, strategy, process, planning and action are helping you get to your desired outcome then it is a good place to focus in on to start to get healthy.

To discuss more about optimizing your sales team, get in touch with me. If you enjoy articles like this, aimed at improving your business, subscribe to my quarterly newsletter where I send you the latest articles and share helpful resources.

Additional Resources

The following resources helped me organize my thoughts on the qualities of the team:

[PODCAST] Hidden Brain, The Secret To Great Teams.

Academic and insightful. Interviews psychologist Anita Woolley regarding her studies on teams and collective intelligence. Challenges many assumptions we have about teams and goes into details on gender and personality mixes of highly successful teams.

[BOOK] Broken Windows, Broken Business. How the smallest remedies reap the biggest rewards. By Michael Levine.

A motivating read for any leader. Draws from the broken window theory popular in policing to create business examples of how not fixing the small basic problems leads to long term issues. The book outlines problems that can exist within a business and the problems they invite when left unnoticed.