The independent salesperson is no longer the most powerful part of a sales organization.
According to research from CEB, an individual employee’s impact on company-wide performance decreased from 78% to 51% from 2002 to 2012. On the other hand, network performance (how much people give to and take from their coworkers) increased from 22% to 49% of the total impact on company performance.
That’s almost half.
We know how important it is to get alignment between your sales and marketing teams.
But collaboration within your sales team is equally important. LevelEleven Account Executive Ryan Balicki has held several sales management roles, including work at Sprint and Motovicity.
He shared a few tips on how to foster sales collaboration on a sales team:
5 Ways To Encourage More Sales Collaboration
1. Offer Team-Based Bonuses
One of the hardest parts of managing a sales team can be trying to get an individual who has reached his or her goal to continue to push for the team. Once a sales rep hits the personal target, they tune out. The struggle is real.
Sales leaders can prevent this from happening by initiating a team-based bonus structure. Whether it’s offering recognition, commission or even extra paid time off, giving the entire team a goal and reward to go after will motivate them to work together and perform beyond individual metrics.
2. Employ Transparency
Modern sales leaders must have transparency. Anyone who has had a manager that keeps people in the dark understands that it’s not beneficial to a team environment.
Within a team, the sales leader has to create unity between members. Having transparency about the organization as a whole and about the sales team, specifically, nurtures trust.
Managers should create transparency around company vision, performance, metrics and more.
3. Create A Team-Oriented Atmosphere
Obvious, but impossible to not include on this list.
Make sure your team-oriented atmosphere encourages healthy competition, where employees challenge each other but are also willing to both ask questions and share successful strategies.
4. Foster A Healthy Work Culture
Modern sales leaders understand the importance of culture, and a team-oriented atmosphere will roll quite smoothly into a good culture.
A healthy work culture includes shared ideas of how people should act, communicate and celebrate.
Those who manage their sales teams by fear will create a negative culture that breeds turnover. Managers who use respect will see a lot more positivity within the culture. Learn more about how to define your work culture here.
5. Hire The Smile, Not The Shark
Hiring is a vital part of building collaboration within your sales team.
A sales manager has to make sure that any new member brought in really fits within the sales team. One poor attitude can dampen the entire culture.
That’s why sales managers might want to consider hiring the smile, not the shark. We know, idioms are cheesy and terrible. But this one is important: A good sales leader can teach someone how to sell, but the best sales leaders can’t teach someone how to be a good person. Skills, abilities and knowledge can be educated, but personalities cannot simply be changed.
All of these pieces fit together to create a collaborative environment for sales teams. Learn how to scale sales like a high performance sales team with this webinar:
