“You will have built a culture and a journey that people want to stay for, and that is also instilled in those who are joining your group, the same qualities, because you are all collectively living your mission at this point.” – Richard Cogswell in today’s Tip 1791
How do you create an exceptional sales team?
Join the conversation below and check out the links!
The Cultural Sales Leader
Richard Cogswell Website
Richard Cogswell on LinkedIn
Submit a Sales Tip
Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Richard Cogswell. Richard is a people-first sales leader and author of the new book The Cultural Sales Leader. He is an organizational team builder who believes that people, vision, values, and behaviors build winning sales cultures. Living and working in Singapore, Richard is currently working in Fintech and card issuance. Here he is:
Richard Cogswell: So I’m often asked, how do you create an exceptional sales team? In the book, The Cultural Sales Leader, what I’m talking about here is how you can transform your sales environment through the power of unleashing the creativity and behaviors of your team by building culture. And the premise there is that behaviors create culture that lead to results. And I also talk about the basic concept that if you get the people side right, the results will come. But to my mind, this is phase two of working with any sales team.
Phase one is about getting a thorough understanding of your company’s trajectory through its data pipeline, understanding what its winning use cases are, building a defined go-to-market plan, focus and finishing on new business, landing and expanding key identified customers, and having a communicable vision and plan that you can share with your team, your cross-functional peers, your leadership, which includes an articulation of opportunities and risks and what needs to be true to win. Once you have those fundamentals, then the element which will build an exceptional team is to focus on your culture. And that begins by finding the leaders within your cohort and working with them so that they are spreading your philosophy, your approach, and your culture.
I describe all of this in the book with tools and templates, but fundamentally, what this is about is then freeing yourself as a leader from being pulled into the trenches and the day-to-day fighting of particular opportunities or challenges with customers or trying to get deals across the line, which is often the temptation for a newly promoted sales leader and can happen in environments where the product or offering is complex or where the go-to-market has not been defined well at all.
And a good example of this is instilling behavior behaviors as opposed to KPIs or directorial leadership is around the topic of escalations. Instead, I mean, escalations are inevitable, but instead, you ask, what do you think we should do? Or who in the organization have you spoken to and what are our available options? Which is not to say that there can be no escalations, right? But it does confer on others the requirement, the responsibility to think creatively about their, and by extension, the business. And you do this by trusting your people and giving them the tools and the freedom to build their own networks and ability to source solutions, which they can then bring to the table.
And the more this becomes an instilled behavior, the freer you are as the sales leader to start to think a little bit further out and to think about, well, what does my three to five year journey actually look like? And what are the investments or that I need to transform this business that I was hired to lead or turn around? And this all can become exceptionally powerful, especially if your group has already been through a reset or a journey.
For example, I did this in a turnaround situation where we had to totally reset a business, which we essentially doubled in under two years. And then by showing a three to five year journey, you already had buy-in from those who have already seen what you’ve been able to achieve to date. And more especially, by this stage, you will have built a culture and a journey that people want to stay for, and that is also instilled in those who are joining your group, the same qualities, because you are all collectively living your mission at this point.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Richard and buy his book, The Cultural Sales Leader, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1791. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!