Transcript

[0:00] Corporate culture is a huge topic, it gets talked about a lot, and it's the domain of consultants who will do amazing three-day off-sites with executive groups and sales teams, and not a whole heck of a lot changes from a measurable perspective.
I will be sharing with you ideas and insights around the three things that actually make up the, culture of your organization as a whole.

[0:37] 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 be a great team and hit more targets with full funnel freedom, Welcome to the full funnel of freedom podcast. I'm your host Hamish Knox today I will be sharing with you ideas and insights around the three things that actually, make up the culture of your sales team and the culture of your organization as a whole.
Now let's hear from one of our affiliate partners.
The perfect CRM system, streamlined business processes, and happier customers.
Aligio CRM Inc can make it happen for your business. Go to www.fullfunnelfreedom.com slash Aligio for more details. That's www.fullfunnelfreedom.com slash E L I G E O.

[1:40] Corporate culture is a huge topic. It gets talked about a lot and it's the domain of consultants who will do amazing three day off sites with executive groups and sales teams, and not a whole heck of a lot changes from a measurable perspective because as much as we like to have.
Catchy buzzwords that describe our culture and we have games and food and team-building and all that kind of stuff That's not what our corporate culture. So our corporate culture has three components, Behavior that's approved. Is it past or present focused and is it reactive or proactive number one the corporate culture of.

[2:25] Your sales team and Your organization a whole is the behavior that is approved, implicitly or explicitly. That's it. Human beings are creatures of behavior and we, can only interpret the behavior that we see. We can certainly understand the words that come out of the mouth of our leader around what the culture of the organization is, but if there's a difference between the words that are spoken or the words that are on our company intranet or webpage or whatever it might be, and the behavior that is approved of implicitly or explicitly, that is what becomes our culture.
So for example, is explicitly approving behavior like disqualifying opportunities for our sellers for very good reasons, not because our seller wanted to get their emotional needs met, but because they went through the qualifying steps and they discovered that while this buyer represent a really nice logo that we would love to say that we work with, they are not qualified.
Do we celebrate that explicitly?
If so, that's gonna communicate to our other sellers that it's not only okay to say no to a potential buyer.

[3:44] But it's actually encouraged if we are following our steps.
On the other side, do we just casually allow our top performers to show up late for sales funnel review meetings or not show up at all and not even address it when they aren't there.
Like, yeah, I get it. If they're sick or they're on holiday or whatever, they're probably not showing up for a sales funnel review meeting.
But if they just aren't there and we don't say anything about it, what that is communicating to our other sellers implicitly is that if you were at a certain level, hopefully not the boss's favorite, but you were actually performing at a certain level, You're allowed to blow off internal meetings with no penalties.
So look back, if you're thinking about a gap in the culture that you have right now and you're frustrated about, you know, why is the team not coming together or why are we not doing something consistently.

[4:40] Unfortunately we have to put the mirror on ourselves and go, what am I approving of from a behavior perspective? And by the way, it may be implicit. It may be that we're just letting that pass by, that behavior pass by with no consequences or no mention of it. And when things aren't mentioned by us as the leader, our sellers are going to make up their own story. And perception is reality is a cliche for a reason, because there is a grain of truth to it.
And so the reality of our sellers will be whatever the story they make up instead of the culture that we want to have.
Secondly, is our culture past-focused or present-focused?

[5:22] You've experienced past-focused cultures. They're very easy to spot, because the individuals in those past-focused cultures will say things like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, or this is the way that we've always done things, or we tried that once and it didn't work.
In that case, we are purely operating from the past. And unfortunately, if we're operating from the past, our competitors and our buyers are moving on, and they are getting so far ahead of us that we unfortunately may never catch up if we are locked into this past-focused culture of this is the way it's always been done, we tried that once and it failed, Don't take any risks, just do it this way.
On the flip side, the present focus culture isn't dramatically risk-taking.
Some of you might hear me describe the past focus culture and be like, yeah, that feels pretty good.
And it does because human beings as a whole are very good with the past because everything was better in the past, right?

[6:27] We're okay with the present and we suck at the future. And look at all the studies out there to talk about prediction accuracy by so-called experts and things like that.
Human beings really aren't good at the future.
So it doesn't mean that if we have a present-focused culture it means that we are all of a sudden taking all kinds of risks and putting the company's payroll on one roll of the dice in Las Vegas or whatever other cliche you wanna make up about risk-taking.
What it means is that everyone from leadership on down is open to new information.
They're open to new approaches. They're open to taking small bets.
There's a really great book by Annie Duke called Little Bets that I highly encourage you to read.
And it talks about how can we make small bets or do small experiments that could pay off to be really big or if they don't work, it hasn't sent us down a path that could be highly detrimental to our organization.

[7:34] So present focus cultures are ones that will pause and consider a new approach.
They will ask questions about a new approach or a new technology as opposed to rejecting them out of hand. Obviously my preference is to be in a present focused culture but if you believe that maybe you are in a past focused culture, a way to change that is to to ask a question, right?
When someone says, we've always done it this way, fair enough, we've always done it this way, but why did we always do it that way?
Let's get to the underlying root of it.
To take this out of the business world, there was a book that I read a couple of years ago that was referencing human beings and patterns of behavior, and the author was talking about how he noticed one day that his daughter was preparing a ham for dinner, and she sliced the end off the ham.
And the author said to his daughter, why are you cutting the end off the ham?
And his daughter said, well, that's how mom taught me to do it.

[8:39] So author goes to his wife and says, out of curiosity, why do you slice the end off the ham?
Because our daughter just said that that's what you taught her to do.
And his wife said, well, I learned it from my mom.
And so the author's mother-in-law was still alive, so the next time that he saw her, he said, hey, I had this curious conversation with my daughter and my wife, and they said that you were the root of this behavior, which is slicing the end off the ham.
Can you help me understand why?
And his mother-in-law said, oh, one time we bought a ham that was too large for the pan, so I cut the end off to make it fit.
So this behavior that had been repeated forever, and it was the way that we had always done things, was started because a pan was too small.

[9:29] And if we ask these questions about our past focused culture, we may discover that there, were very, very good reasons in the past for doing a certain behavior or focusing on a certain market segment, but those reasons aren't valid anymore.
But if we don't pause and ask the question and really sit and listen to the answer as opposed to being reactionary, we won't actually be able to shift into that present focused culture, which by being present focused, actually moves us into the future.
Speaking of reactionary, our corporate culture, the third component is, is it reactive or proactive?
And this is where we as leaders really come to the fore. Yes, we are certainly approving the behavior implicitly or explicitly, and we may be driving a little bit of that past focused culture, but where things can really go sideways in terms of the corporate culture of our team is, are we modeling reactive culture to our sellers? Adults learn by imitation. And just like children, we're all really, we're all big kids. And if we look around at the leaders that we work with and for.

[10:48] And typically we have one or two reactions, either I love what they did, I'm going to repeat it when when I'm in a leadership role, or, oh, I completely hated that, I will never do what that person, what that leader did to me when I was on their team.
No matter which version of that story we're telling ourselves, if we are showing up to conversations with our sellers without an agenda.
Or we are canceling coaching sessions or accountability reviews at the last minute, or we let sales pipeline reviews drag on and on and on past the scheduled time because we're allowing the sellers on our team or even us to chase rabbits that are really irrelevant to most of the group.

[11:36] We're demonstrating to our sellers that it's okay to be reactionary.
So what we get back from them is sellers who don't really do any proactive prospecting until we really put the pressure on them.
And then they go into this flurry of proactive prospecting activity that usually ends with a couple of really qualified opportunities in the pipeline, but also an exhausted seller who's like, I never wanna do that again, let me polish up my LinkedIn profile.
We also end up with a seller who's got a relatively skinny pipeline all the way to the end of the month or the end of the quarter when magically there's all these deals that suddenly show up that go across the finish line that weren't in the funnel yesterday.
But that's being reactionary instead of being proactive and managing their pipeline all the way through.
So if you know someone who is more of a reactionary leader, because it's our friends who have problems, If they come to you and say, hey, I heard this Full Funnel Freedom podcast about corporate culture and a couple of those reactionary points stood out to me, what would you suggest I do?
Well, number one is keep your commitments to your team. That's the greatest way to show being proactive is to keep the commitment.
If the sales funnel review meeting is scheduled for 45 minutes and you get to 43 minutes and you notice that you're still not quite wrapped up.

[13:02] Bring it up say to the team. Hey everybody. I've allowed this meeting to drag on a little bit too long It looks like we're not going to finish at 45 minutes Is everyone comfortable if we stay for another 15 and I'll make sure that we're wrapped up in in 15 minutes great that's showing being proactive if we have to cancel a coaching call or.

[13:24] Accountability check-in or check-out Yeah life happens my eldest daughter when I was away actually on a trip, split her molar in half by chomping on a peanut.
Now fortunately it was a baby molar and the other molar, the reason it split was the other molar was pushing up from underneath, but family comes first.
We gotta go deal with that and I gotta let my seller know, hey, I'm not gonna be able to make our coaching session because I gotta take my daughter to an emergency dentist appointment.
That's okay, right? Life does happen.
But when life happens over and over and over again, the trust our seller has in us to keep our commitments goes down.
And the other simple thing to do to be proactive is to have an agenda and stick to it.
And I know for a lot of sales leaders, we wanna put 74 things on our agenda for a 25 minute meeting.
What's the two things that we can accomplish? It's like in Canada, there's a note often in the doctor's office that says, one issue or two minor issues only?
If you have more than that, please book another appointment.
Think about that when you're booking coaching conversations with your sellers.

[14:33] What's the one thing that you want to address or the two small things that can be accomplished within the time window that you've set up?
There was a previous episode of Full Funnel Freedom about not letting coaching sessions drag on and on that I would encourage you to listen to if you'd like some more details on that.
So overall, our corporate culture.
Is the behavior approved implicitly or explicitly. It's either past focused or present focus, and it's reactive or proactive, and we are the ones as leaders modeling that reactive or proactive behavior.
So when you think about the culture of your team, if it's not exactly where you want it to be, keep in mind that just as cream rises to the top, so do bad smells.
And if the corporate culture is maybe a little, smelling a little off, filter your culture through those three lenses and come up with some proactive behaviors that you can do.

[15:27] To start modeling the culture that you want for your sellers to demonstrate back to you.
This has been the Full Funnel of Freedom podcast. I've been your host, Hamish Knox, today sharing with you ideas and insights about what corporate culture really is and how we can adjust it for the better.
The Full Funnel of Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler Calgary.
Sandler Calgary's clients desire to dominate their niche and seek to scale sales sustainably.
If that sounds like you or someone you know, go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler, for more details and to book a 15 minute initial call.
Thanks for listening. Leave us a review or a rating and share this episode with a sales leader in your network who you care about.
Until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.
Thank you for listening to Full Funnel Freedom with Amish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to Full Funnel Freedom.

[16:28] Music.