Building The Culture of Your Sales Team For The Future

Twenty years ago I was hired at a home builder company, and I was so excited. Very nervous too, mostly because the jobs that I had had up to this point were more stepping stones than anything.

But this one provided the chance for me to really step into a career. Everyone who worked at this company looked like they were making a lot of money and were all very sharp. The company was a multi-billion dollar company, so again, I was really, really stoked to get to work there.

If you’d asked me when I was growing up what kind of career I wanted, it wouldn’t have been a specific job. What I was really looking for was something where I could have fun.

But in addition to that, I also wanted to do something that had some impact. And this industry certainly had all of the makings for that to happen.

If you look at some of the studies done specifically one done by CNBC just last year, they said that 56% of workers are actually valuing culture, which is what I would have been calling it at the time. They said a good culture is more important than their salary.

In that same study, they found that three out of four applicants actually did some serious research on a company’s culture before even submitting the application.

I wish I was one of the three out of four that did research before they started at a job, but I did not. Instead, I made this naive assumption that a company with that much success had to have a great culture.

Well, it didn’t take me too long to figure out the culture that I had stepped into and it was… less than positive.

Here’s an example. Every Monday morning, our sales team would gather in this big long hallway waiting for one of the sales managers to come down and open up one of the training rooms so we could all go in. For whatever reason, they were always late, but it gave me a taste for what the actual culture was.

I heard things said about how much people didn’t like the managers. I heard them bash the company. And that’s where I first learned the phrase, “Come to the meeting to get your beating.”

Not good.

Unsurprisingly, roughly 80% of that team had their resumes out to find another job. But while everyone was running to go work at a different company, I actually got promoted up in the management during all of this.

The team was still hoping for some big change, and sure enough, that is exactly what happened. The company hired someone who would become one of my heroes in this industry and her name is Marcia.

Marcia came in and for three weeks did absolutely nothing. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t give any directives. She just watched, and then she implemented her vision.

Within one year of starting, Marcia was able to take that culture from what I just described to the formerly downtrodden sales team referring their friends and family to come work at the company.

How did she do it? Through her vision with four major points, which included the idea of future casting your culture.

Here are the four things Marcia did to turn around an entire company culture in no time flat:

Celebrated Not Tolerated

The first thing Marcia did was to create a culture where the sales team was celebrated, not tolerated. This involved a couple of things.

Initially, she sat down with each and every department head and told them, “You are no longer allowed to talk negatively about the team.” She banned them from doing it. In fact, she wouldn’t even let them come into our sales meetings and talk unless she filtered what they were going to talk about first.

Pretty bold, right?

The second thing Marcia did was to get us to be celebrated. Those very same department heads actually clapped for us when we would walk in the building. It was kind of awkward, but kind of cool at the same time.

And then one of the neatest things that she did was rebrand the team with something that we didn’t really feel was appropriate, but it worked.

You know the Tina Turner song: Simply the best?

Well, she put that phrase in gold letters on the wall in the sales training rooms: Simply The Best.

At the time, we weren’t simply the best. But what I loved about what Marcia did was she set an expectation that we needed to rise to. And that’s exactly what happened.

Create A Positive Environment

The second thing Marcia did was to create a really positive environment, and then guard it like crazy. She explained that she actually didn’t get the whole company to become positive; she just shielded the sales team from all of that garbage we had been hearing.

By doing this, she created a subculture of a positive culture, which I thought was amazing. As the saying goes, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Protecting ourselves from negative things is just as important as creating more positive ones.

Take Interest

The third thing Marcia did was to get the sales management team to take an interest in each and every salesperson, both personally and professionally. This was in order for us to simply serve them so that they could grow and become better.

Because she led by example and took an interest in me, she cleared the path for me to eventually become the national sales trainer for that company and then move on to do things like what I do today.

Impact Vs. Results

The fourth thing Marcia did was to have a company culture where we looked at the impact, versus the results. She wanted us to start talking about what impact we were having on the families (our clients). And so it became about the stories of someone other than us, which is critical to building a good culture.

We did a study centered around building an insanely great culture, one that people want to be a part of. If you have this culture in the workplace, then the revenue growth can increase four times! Great culture equals increased revenue growth.

But with an absence of vision, pride, ego, greed — all these things come into play and create a toxic culture in the workplace.

Wrapping It Up

Now, I’m gonna give you a little bit of a homework assignment to do.

1. First, observe the culture that you have now. What is good about your existing culture now?
2. Second, look at how you can magnify those things. What you focus on gets magnified, so how do you bring those things more into the forefront?
3. The third thing (and perhaps the most challenging) is what you need to cut out of your culture. This could be as simple as a policy or a procedure or something like that, but it might also be that you need to cut out personnel.I can’t tell you how many sales managers I’ve talked to who have people who make a lot of sales but they’re killing the culture. And if that’s the case, you’re going to have to make some changes.

   Why? Because your standards are not what you desire, they are what you accept.

4. The last thing is to consider more than your own voice. Look at your own salespeople. What do they say about the job when you’re not around? The thing to look at is the referral rate. The Society for Human Resource Management shows that if you have a fantastic culture, the internal employee referral rate actually goes up to 41%, so that’s a great metric.And also look at the customer view. What do they say that your culture is? If it’s positive, you will see more good feedback.

And as you put into play your vision for workplace culture, imagine that your culture represents the roots of a tree, and the better the culture, the deeper the roots go. Build those roots deep because when the winds blow, whether it be a pandemic, the market dips, or whatever your company goes through, you’re going to survive any storm. So build your vision, and then work on it every single day.