A World-Class Culture: Part 4
In today’s work environment, your company’s culture can easily be the factor that determines whether or not a potential employee decides to join your sales team. While compensation packages and other perks are nice, top sales recruits are looking to be part of something where they feel motivated to do their very best because they enjoy where they work and who they’re working with.
Creating a world-class culture not only influences your ability to recruit, it also has a tremendous impact on employee retention and productivity. In fact, your company’s culture could very much determine its future.
What a Poor Culture Looks Like
Cultivating an impressive culture is of the utmost importance, especially because of how detrimental a poor culture can be. High turnover rates, poor attitudes regarding management and negative rivalries between colleagues can create a toxic environment that drives away top talent and hurts your team’s productivity, ultimately resulting in big losses for your company.
If any of these issues exist within your own company, it’s a clear sign that something needs to change.
What a World-Class Culture Looks Like
Standing in stark contrast to a poor sales culture, a world-class culture is one that thrives, thanks to the mutual trust that is created by strong leadership. Employees feel valued and respected by both their managers and other salespeople. As a result, they enjoy working as part of the team. When such is the case, your clients benefit as well. Interacting with people that are excited about where they work to translate that positive energy throughout the sales process.
Most importantly, individuals working in this type of environment stick around for the long haul and strive to deliver the best results possible 100 percent of the time.
How to Make the Necessary Changes
So how do you go about making your company’s culture world class? Here are a few key starting points:
- Bring the Right People Onboard: It all starts here. You’re much better off proceeding at a slower pace during the recruiting process so you can hire passionate individuals who will do their best, rather than settling for someone that could do the job, but doesn’t mesh within your culture and may not stick around.
- Always Provide Room to Grow and Learn: Quality salespeople want to continue learning and improving their skills. When you provide useful, valuable training to your employees, you demonstrate that you are invested in their success—a move that pays off for everyone involved.
- Unified Front: Both managers and salespeople alike need to be on the same page if you wish to be successful. Providing clear communication on expectations and remaining consistent in goals, strategy, company values and even language can keep everyone on track for success.
- Healthy Competition: Complacent sales teams are doomed to fail, which is why hiring competitive salespeople is so vital for your business. Hiring team players ensures that all competition is friendly, never harmful. And of course, you can also use competitions within your company to help spur your team on to better results.
- Accountability for All: It’s great to celebrate wins after a successful quarter of sales, but it’s also important that everyone on the team is able to lose gracefully in order to learn from failure. Team members should be held accountable for poor results, but these instances should be viewed by all as an opportunity to learn and benchmark.
- Fun: In addition to managers utilizing inspirational leadership principles, the best companies understand having fun is a necessity. Whether that fun comes from regular outings or daily ping pong matches, creating an enjoyable workplace will go a long way in attracting and retaining top sales talent.
Parting Thoughts
Implementing these elements will allow your company to develop a world-class culture and become a place where your sales team can thrive. And when this happens, you will have gained another advantage over your competition in the never-ending recruiting war for top salespeople.
*Image Credit:
– Featured Image, Pexels
