Managing Your Sales Cultural Performance

Matching the correct account executive with your current and future sales goals is important to the success of your sales team. However, your business culture and sales behavioral culture must match as well.

Selling products or services to management is a premeditated sport. It is a process of planned calculated steps. When managed correctly, these steps help minimize failure and increase sales quota success.

To increase sales success, you need to balance your firm’s cultural and business environment with your sales strategy implementation and sales team’s needs and expectations.

Sales is not a silo process, focused on capturing revenue independently. Revenue capture is a team sport, requiring the alignment of marketing, strategy, and operations, as well as accounting, to help the sales team sell more. It is critical that the corporate business progression be aligned with the cultural progression of your team. Having a business process that ignores the cultural process will ultimately affect your company’s ability to hit its revenue goals.

One way to forecast your sales team’s potential success is by measuring its cultural acceptance of your management style.

Take Our Sales Cultural Audit Test

1. Are your sales account managers asked for input before they are assigned an annual sales quota?
   ____Yes ____No
2. Has your sales team been given a written sales process on how it should sell prospects?
   ____Yes ____No
3. Has your sales team been supplied a buyer prototype that identifies the ideal prospect it should approach and sell?
   ____Yes ____No
4. Does your sales team receive monthly financial incentives (MBOs or management by objectives, or sales scorecard goals) to induce them into specific sales steps (cold calls, presentations, etc.)?
   ____Yes ____No
5. Does your sales team meet at least quarterly to create a team esprit de corps?
   ____Yes ____No
6. Does your sales team role-play at least once a month and evaluate each other’s performances?
   ____Yes ____No
7. Do you have a centralized information repository (i.e., employee portal, website, etc.) where sales team members can deposit or collect sales and marketing support materials and competitive information, and post requests for help from sales peers to help them close more business?
   ____Yes ____No
8. Do you have detailed job descriptions for your sales team members (signed by the respective person), outlining management’s expectations of their performance on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis?
   ____Yes ____No
9. Does your sales team receive quarterly written performance reviews with recommendations for improvements?
   ____Yes ____No
10. Are sales team members asked annually what their financial and career goals are?
    ____Yes ____No

Correct Answers:

All correct answers are yes and each correct answer is worth 10%. How did you score? The higher your score, the more your sales behavioral culture matches your business culture.

Sales culture is just as important as sales skills and strategy. The sales team’s business expectations must match management’s expectations to maximize your company’s revenue capture opportunities. When a sales team’s cultural environment is not aligned with management’s business expectations, sales team members become disenchanted and, ultimately, low performers.

To maximize sales success, make sure your sales team has the business values and expected behavior needed for revenue success. Just a small change in your team’s cultural behavior can have a dramatic effect in sales.