Creating the Right Environment

Great salespeople create an environment to buy. 

Great sales leaders create an environment to sell.

If you lead a team, have you thought about this? Do you have an idea of what a great selling environment looks like?

As we wind down over the next couple of weeks (or accelerate at a breakneck pace to try and make a number for the year), in the quiet moments you have, I'd like you to think about this concept, and I'm willing to bet you haven't before.

I see a lot of leaders make avoidable mistakes.

A positive selling environment is not one where you're buddy-buddy with your reps. Connecting on a daily basis does not mean you have a good relationship, and it definitely doesn't ensure that you're helping them reach their potential.

Sitting behind a computer screen and monitoring the numbers doesn't mean you're holding them accountable. Trying not to be a micromanager means they're probably not getting enough support from you.

There are a lot of factors that go into a constructive selling environment, and I want to highlight two big ones today because I think they're the most significant. They're also the ones my clients most often get wrong.

Vulnerability

This is a bigger deal than you think. You've heard me talk about the Sales Success Cycle before and how reps need to bring themselves to their sales methods in order to do their best work. That means they need the space and support to figure that out.

If you're their leader and you're insisting that everybody does it one way or that "it's the number or the door," you're squashing any creativity that your team may have, and you're settling for mediocrity. You deserve better, so do they, and so do their customers.

Your team needs to be given the space where they can be allowed to try things, fail, learn, and grow. Some will do it because they're bull-headed enough (that was me), but most won't. When you give them permission and encouragement to do this, they're going to be more engaged and will perform at a higher level. You know this to be true without even having done it.

But aside from a few cases, you're going to need to be vulnerable with them first so they feel they can be vulnerable enough to try new things. Make no mistake. The culture starts at the top. 

Accountability

Let's be clear. That doesn't mean you're giving your team permission to ignore their quotas. Budgets are designed with these in mind, and we need to keep the lights on. You encourage them to take a level of artistic license with their sales methods, but the expected outcome is still clear. 

This immediately creates an environment of support and focus. You're showing them you believe in them; you trust them. That's going to help them get dialed in on their objective and make sure that creativity is pointed in the right direction. 

You can hold someone accountable without being the villain. The best accountability partners are often cheerleaders. I say this all the time, but there isn't a human being that wouldn't perform better knowing that someone was looking out for them. Be that person in the most supportive way possible: by believing they can do it their own way and then expecting that they will.

Most team leaders get stuck in the same vicious cycle that reps do. It's just a different version. You expect that there is a certain way to do things "right," and you look for some magic playbook to run that doesn't exist.

If you take these two concepts, think about the best way you can apply them on your team, and then trust yourself to do it, you'll get better results than you ever thought possible and much more quickly than you realize.

Take a step back and think about the environment you created in 2022. Now think about what you'll do with a fresh start in a couple of weeks.

2023 is already looking brighter.