In sales, recruiting a strong team is the only path to success. But what are the traits of effective salespeople? And, when bringing together a group of individuals with unique backgrounds, personalities and skill sets to pursue a common mission, what are the secrets to building a truly effective team?
In the tech industry, no two sales “dream teams” look exactly alike. Building a successful team is a multi-step endeavor that begins at the hiring process and extends long after employees are brought on board. As company leaders help team members find their fit and own their individual roles, successful sales teams can come together naturally, thriving through mutual respect, earned autonomy, and an overarching spirit of collaboration.
But every sales team must also be closely aligned with a company’s overarching mission, fluent in discussing its value proposition, and driven to not only close sales but to develop professionally at the same time. That last characteristic — “drive” — comes up repeatedly when discussing effective sales teams. We asked three senior business leaders to share their insights on creating collaborative, nurturing cultures that set salespeople up to succeed.
3PL Central is a cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS) solutions company, built to meet the unique needs of the 3PL warehousing community.
What’s your blueprint for building a successful sales team?
We’ve all heard the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and I’m a big believer in that. I have found that the best way to start building a team is to establish a set of core values or beliefs that team members can buy into. These values help set the standard of what it means to be a member of your team and can even help guide members of your team in a more overarching way, independent of how they are performing at any given time.
How do you enable reps to be effective in their roles?
Enablement is a huge area where most organizations falter. It isn’t just about onboarding. It’s about on-going training, streamlined processes that make sense for your prospects and your team, a coach or a mentor beyond their assigned manager, and delivering on their demands. You have to feed your reps or make it easy for them to hunt.
In today’s remote selling world, you should expect to have a sales tool stack that enables your reps to move efficiently through their day. Time is our most limited resource, so tools like Salesforce, HubSpot and Outreach.io help you to integrate a defined sales process, ensuring reps know what to do and when to do it.
What’s the most important characteristic you look for in a salesperson?
This may not be as popular an answer as others I could give, but after having been in revenue functions for 25 years, the most important characteristic that I have found to be the largest predictor of success in a salesperson is drive.
Now, to some, drive might just translate as “hard work.” From my perspective, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sales reps who are truly driven focus on the things that help them get better, like committing to learning the industry they are selling into and the business challenges that your product solves for. Driven reps work to understand their metrics and what drives the outcomes they want. And, of course, drive also means both working hard and working smart.
Natural curiosity and active listening are also important. To me, people who are truly driven understand and commit to learning how to sharpen those skills, because they know such skills contribute to their overall success. You can’t teach drive, so you better make sure you hire for it.
You can’t teach drive, so you better make sure you hire for it.”
When scaling, how do you ensure your team doesn’t lose the elements that made it so successful in the first place?
This one can be difficult. I have built teams from scratch and taken over teams in excess of 40 people. Your values should always stay front and center where team members are concerned. Including them in presentations, and acknowledging and rewarding team members that demonstrate a particular value are both examples of communicating to your team what is important beyond the numbers.
Hiring salespeople is hard. I’ve found that taking a more scientific approach keeps you honest. Hiring scorecards that include identifying important characteristics, not just experience, are a useful tool in finding the right people for your team.
Additionally, onboarding and ongoing skills development should be supported by a village, not just a manager. At 3PL Central, we accomplish this by having subject matter experts from all over our company teach and certify reps in various areas all intended to help them in their role. Beyond that, we have our more senior reps designated as coaches who ramp less-experienced reps into the business. Coaches are responsible for the success of their assigned reps, which drives collaboration and helps prepare reps to become business leaders in the future.
VideoAmp creates software and data solutions that enable advertisers to accurately measure and optimize their entire portfolio of linear TV, over-the-top, digital and walled garden investments.
What’s your blueprint for building a successful sales team?
Hiring is a significant responsibility; for the company for which you are recruiting, for the team you are creating and for the people you are asking to join you. Building a successful team requires a really clear idea of what background will enable a new teammate to be successful and what about their experience will contribute value to the team as a whole. I seek to hire people who have high “wanna-buy-from” energy. Are they engaging, smart and able to elicit from the customer the truth of what really matters to them?
At VideoAmp, I have worked to find people with a technology sales background who can articulate our value proposition to brands and who can stick with a longer sales cycle. We have brought in people from Nielsen, Viant, Neustar, Data+Math, Quantcast and iSpot, all of whom contribute competitive intelligence as well as valuable skills.
What’s the most important characteristic you look for in a salesperson?
I look for four elements: engagement, relationship building, tenacity and collaboration. Do I want to engage with them, and do I think our customers will enjoy engaging with them? Once they have engagement, can they build relationships and uncover needs? Will they stick with the long sales cycle and drive it to a close? Will they support their colleagues across the organization, and especially on their team?
When scaling, how do you ensure your team doesn’t lose the elements that made it so successful in the first place?
As you scale, push out responsibilities to the team, including evaluating new team members for hiring and incorporating veteran team members within the training process. This move provides ownership on the part of the individual team members in terms of supporting the new hire’s success and provides a constant learning loop for all involved with regard to what is essential today versus six months ago.
TigerConnect’s suite of clinical collaboration tools is modernizing the way doctors, nurses, care teams and patients communicate and share data.
What’s your blueprint for building a successful sales team?
For me, finding people who have a career plan is essential. A role with TigerConnect should align with a new hire’s next step and beyond in the journey they have already been on. People who know where they want to go professionally can articulate why this role aligns with their path. Oftentimes candidates may not understand what subsequent steps look like for them, but that’s OK. We’re here to help them learn and grow along the way.
What’s the most important characteristic you look for in a salesperson?
A successful salesperson can demonstrate how they have accomplished something difficult. The best things in life require persistence over an extended period of time. Those who have achieved something special know specifically how they accomplished that mission and can articulate the keys to their success.
When scaling, how do you ensure your team doesn’t lose the elements that made it so successful in the first place?
Ask the team what’s working and more importantly, what’s not. We find ourselves documenting and sharing our progress along the way, but we must stay humble and listen to those on the front lines each day.
