How to Run an Effective Sales Team

This is the full funnel freedom podcast, supporting sales leaders, and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results. Lead a great team and hit more targets with. Funnel freedom. Welcome to the full funnel freedom podcast, episode number nine, I'm your host Hamish Knox.
In this episode, I will be sharing with you ideas and insights on how to run an effective sales Team. First thing to keep in mind is that we don't actually run a team. We run a group of individuals who have their own hopes and fears and dreams, scripts, worldviews personal goals. And if we try to manage them as a team, we are likely to lose our top performers.

And de-motivate the individuals who stick around and that's not a great way to create full funnel freedom in your organization. A recurring theme with the leaders that we work with is that our team members don't actually work for us because they love us or love our company. They work for us because they believe that working for us gets them to their personal goals.

Faster than working for someone else. And if they ever stopped believing that they will move on and they will tell us something like it was more money or a better title or more flexibility or something like that. And really in code words, they're saying, I believe working for somebody else is going to get me to my personal goals faster than working for you.

However, what's beautiful about that knowledge is that if we can truly understand our individual team members, personal goals, we can actually create highly motivated individuals because instead of slogging their way through to achieve a corporate quota, They're working on achieving a personal goal. One of the things that we tell the leaders we work with is that a quota is not a goal, but it's a gift.

And the reason it's a gift is because it tells our team members what you need to do to, to stay on the team by. By tying achievement of their quota to a realization of a personal goal, whether it's saving for a down payment on a house, or maybe they can go on a very nice vacation or maybe they can start saving or put one of their children through post-secondary education or help them start their first entrepreneurial venture, whatever it might be.

When salespeople see that they are working for themselves as opposed to working for us, that is when we get true motivation and they are more likely to follow our processes and stick to the. Procedures that are going to create full funnel freedom, not only for us, but for them, my friend, bill Bartlett, and his book on coaching talked about the three P's of leadership.

And these are actually the three greatest gifts that leaders can provide to their people. The first one is permission, permission to fail because they're human. They will we're human. We will. But then to give our team members protection that when they do fail, we're going to look at it as a learning opportunity, a growth opportunity and a coaching opportunity as opposed to a gotcha moment.

Yup. Gotcha. You screwed up. You didn't do this little salesperson. That is not going to create long-term motivation or a strong team. So, first two PS again, are permission to fail and protection that when they do, it's going to be a learning and a growth moment and we're going to hold them safe. And the last P is potency.

Potency means giving our people the tools and the resources that they need to succeed in their current role. And that can be things like a sales process and a selling system, ideal prospect profiles or avatars our resource library internally of audios videos and text-based documents that allow our salespeople to learn and grow and leverage.

They're unique communication skills to follow our process in order to successfully take sales from hi. Nice to meet you too. Looking forward to working with you too. Hasn't this been a great X number of your relationship? Let's make it a great X number of year more relationships. So all the three PS are the greatest gifts a leader can give to their people.

Our number one job as leaders is to create clarity. If there is ambiguity between us and our team in a number of different areas, including say performance expectations, we are going to be burning a lot of our only valuable, which is our time on reinforcing or punishing team members who are. Off the plot as the British, like to say.

So we want to be very clear upfront with our team members and that starts with onboarding. And in fact, I encourage all the leaders that I work with to have their own boarding plan shared with their candidates while they're still in the interviewing process. So even before we extend an offer to a candidate, they already have a sense of if I accept this role, Here's what I'm going to be expected to do week one, week, two, week three, all the way through my onboarding plan, however long that might be, and we're going to dive deeper and onboarding plans in a future episode.

The other thing that we need to keep in mind as leaders is we must be consistent with our. If there is incongruity or a disconnect between what we say and what we do, we are going to tell our team what is important through our actions. Not through our words, someone in my network got a new manager and the new manager came in and was talking a lot about accountability.

We're going to be accountable, accountable, accountable. They weren't showing up for meetings on time or showing up for meetings at all. They were asking to reschedule one-on-one coaching appointments with individual team members at the last minute, with some sort of a vague apology. They told their team everything that they needed to know about accountability through their behavior and unsurprisingly, they started to get frustrated with their team about why they weren't accountable.

And no one could really articulate it, but. Someone had been enabled to share with this leader, you weren't accountable your behavior wasn't accountable. So your team figured that we're going to pay attention to the behavior more than to what you're saying, because we believe your behavior more than we believe what you're working.

By the way it's a good lesson for us as leaders, our people can be saying that they will do these certain activities, or they will say these certain things to clients and prospects to create full funnel freedom. And if they're not doing it and we've given them the opportunity to adjust their behavior and they're just not doing it, it ain't going to get.

And that ties into the three CS of running an effective team. One of which we've already covered, which is being clear, ask ourselves, are we clear with our expectations for performance, for activities, for who? Our ideal sales are? The next C is coaching. Did we give out? Individual team members, opportunities for development through coaching, which could be role-play, which could be conversational coaching, not giving them the answer.

Not giving them the answers as managers burn your Cape. If we are giving the answers to our salespeople, all we are doing is creating, learned helplessness. We are not actually supporting them. And then the third C is actually more on our, our individual team member, which is, did they demonstrate that they were willing to change?

So we can say, well, where are we clear? With our expectations for performance activities, et cetera. Yes. Did we give our team member all the coaching that we could, where it was legitimate coaching? We were role playing. We were asking questions. We were not giving them the answers. Yes, we did. Did they demonstrate that they were willing to change and by demonstrating that they were willing to change, it's not through their words.

It's through their actions. Yes, they did. Okay. So now we have to figure out do what sort of a development path we could put this person on. Are they maybe having technical challenges where they don't know what to say or do, or do they have conceptual challenges where they don't believe that saying or doing what we've asked them to say or do is actually going to work?

Now there's a whole bunch of other aspects of running an effective sales team from accountability. Role-playing coaching running sales funnel review means that contribute to full funnel freedom. We are going to dive into those in much more detail in the future episodes. So this has been the how to succeed podcast episode number nine on how to run an effective sales team.

I've been your host Hamish Knox. Thank you for listening. Please share, rate and review. And until we connect with you on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom. Thank you for listening to fall funnel freedom with Amish knocks. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to full funnel, freedom.com.