Culture in Sales

Aug 1, 2024

Investing in culture is equivalent to investing in your bottom line.

The people you hire are giving you part of their lives. I personally believe money will only buy you so much effort from your employees. While a good culture buys an over the top performance from them.

Some of the best CEOs and founders were the most inspiring. They knew how to cast vision and captivate. They knew how to build a team culture surrounded by the right values. A business needs a culture. Without it, it’s not a business at all.

If you don’t intentionally create a good culture, a bad one may form without your knowning. What impact can a negative culture have on a workplace?

The impact

People want to leave a bad work place.

86% of potential employees won’t apply to a company that has a bad reputation

15% of employees are disengaged inside their workplace
65% of people will leave their job if they feel like they are apart of a business with bad business practices.
58% of employees have left a job because they felt the culture was permeated by negative office politics.

Bad culture leads to turnover, less sales, and customer churn. Take a look at how work related stress is effecting employees day to day.

So how can you fix a poorly run sales operation?

The solution

Over invest in communication

Rep to rep communication as well as rep to leader communication is the foundation of a good culture. It may seem simple, but in order for a relationship to form between your teams you have to talk to each other first. Invest in 1:1s between leaders and each rep. During these 1:1s get to know both the pros and cons of work and personal life. Have a slack channel where reps can talk to each other and share stories. There are so many in cold calling! Lastly, make sure you treat the best reps the same as the worst reps. Just because a rep is killing it, doesn’t mean they don’t want to still spend time with you.

Give credit to where its do

Encourage people to take ownership by giving credit where it’s do. If a rep creates a new script or a new sales tactic, encourage them and let everyone know their accomplishment. This praise will spark a fire within your team and you’ll create a culture of self-driven leaders and researchers.

Friendly team based competition

One of the best things about sales is winning! That quick dopamine shot keeps us alive! Encouraging team based competitions can be a great way to build camaraderie and friendships. If you have the right team you can do individual or buddy competitions, but be careful with these as we don’t want someone to feel left out.

It starts with the Leaders

Leaders, it’s up to you to head the charge. If you want communication to happen, you have to communicate first. If you want to promote friendly competition, you have to lead the charge too. An employee can feel when a leader is passive and they’ll know how to “say the right things” just to appease and move on. Be an active leader and take charge.

Continuous Growth

I imagine a picture of zombies typing on a keyboard and making calls when I think of a company that doesn’t support constant growth and upskilling. There is always more that you can learn. As sales people, we are therapist and psychiatrist at heart. That field is ever evolving so we should be looking for new ideas and philosophies to study. This is one of the main reasons I built Suade, to give people an effective way to learn new sales techniques and execute what they’ve learned quickly!

The outcome

The outcome of a good culture is more than retention.

Having a culture that attracts high-talent can lead to 33% higher revenue
Organizations that focus on mindset in their leadership development programs are almost 2x as likely to have employees that feel they are doing meaningful work
Teams with a strong sense of shared purpose and values have a 17% increase in performance compared to teams without a strong sense of purpose and values.

Overall

Every week, people are spending 40 hours inside your company. They deserve a life filling organization and you can offer that. Spend some time and reflect on how your organizational culture feels. Rate it, and ask a few of your employees to do the same. If you’re the leader maker sure you over invest in culture and your employees will follow suit!

Create a workplace people wake up happy to go to.

Cheers!