Would you have clicked on this article if the title was 5 Ways to Flatline Sales by Building a Mediocre Team? Probably not. I mean, just imagine if your coach or role model came up to you and said, “this year, we just want to be average.” It doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence, does it?
You don’t want to be average! You want to grow, to be part of something bigger, to contribute and make a positive impact. At least, that’s what we’re assuming, since you decided to click on this post. So let’s jump into these 5 ways to increase sales by building a high-performance, winning team.
Encourage Good Habits
I know this sounds simple, but let’s be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The goal is to build strong habits of helping people do more things right, rather than fewer things wrong.
You can build your team’s confidence by observing them and specifically detailing the tasks or behaviors they do really well. Continue to offer recognition and praise for the behaviors you want to develop in your company. This constant positive reinforcement results in these behaviors occurring more often.
Establish Expectations
You can only build your vision by repeatedly sharing crystal clear and compelling expectations. Every night as my kids get ready for bed, I remind them to brush their teeth. Dental hygiene was impressed upon me by my father who would tell me, “only take care of the ones you want to keep.”
The good news is that after all these years, I have two kids with good brushing habits. Continue to build the right habits by proactively, positively, and repeatedly communicating your vision (what you are trying to create) and expectations (what you need in place to build it).
If we use the teeth brushing as an example, the vision would be to keep all your teeth throughout your life. The expectations would be to brush twice a day, floss often, and visit the dentist on a regular basis. Ideally, if you follow the expectations, the vision will be a natural result.
Focus on the Future
It’s important to build skills that can be applied to the future, not the past. We can’t change anything from the past, so the best we can do is learn from it. Eventually the conversation must turn to what you can do as a team to improve.
This type of communication becomes motivating and empowering for your team. Continue to limit verbiage like could have or should have and replace it with going forward, let’s… This will require you to be very conscientious of how you talk with your team, and may take some practice.
Increase Accountability
A big draw of the sales profession is the element of performance-based income. It’s this risk and sense of ownership that motivates and inspires people to excel, as well as find new, sustainable ways to increase sales. Continue to reinforce this behavior and belief by having sales agents report and present their performance metrics to their leadership. Having conversations about what they are doing well and what needs to improve will increase ownership and accountability even more.
Practice, Practice, Practice!
It’s critical to build the habit of intentional, smart practice into the culture. I can watch the Golf channel all day long, but at the end of the day, it probably won’t improve my handicap. Coaching sessions with intelligent, deliberate, structured, and repetitive practice will help you develop and transfer top performing communication sales skills.
Continue to push your coaches to embrace this step into their coaching sessions, and you’ll continue to hear and see improvements in your team’s performance and discover new ways to increase sales.
