The Three Agreements Every Sales Team Must Make
If your sales team isn’t crystal clear on three things, then I promise there is dysfunction and revenue is being left on the table. These concepts are often taken for granted, and leaders are afraid to broach these conversations.
That’s not leadership, and your performance is suffering as a result.
Your Sales Process
Not to be confused with a playbook or a methodology (to be covered in a minute), these things must happen for a sale to be completed. This is the science of selling. It’s pretty rigid and provides the framework for how to reach the intended revenue goal.
Broadly speaking, there are four steps:
Identify who you can help
Get their attention
Communicate your value
Ask for next steps
Within your company’s process, each of those steps may have its own sub-steps. For instance, your prospecting cadence should have more than one touchpoint in it for Step 2. If your sales cycle is longer, you’re likely going to have multiple progressive meetings within step 3, and each ask will be something different until you finally sign the deal.
You need to be clear on what these steps are.
Too many teams fail to standardize these best practices, and their reps don’t completely understand the frameworks in which they’re working. In essence, your sellers are in the same boat, but they’re not all rowing in the same direction.
If you’re the leader, it’s because you didn’t show them how.
The Sales Methodology
I mentioned before that process and methodology are terms that are often used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be. Your methods are the means by which you accomplish the desired end, as standardized by the process.
Your methods make up the art of selling. This is where personality should be encouraged, and that is the agreement.
Let’s talk about that 15-touch prospecting cadence. Should it be via phone or email? Where does social media come into play?
I don’t really care.
Best practices tell us there should be a healthy combination of all of it, but if you have someone who absolutely despises the phone and can still get the job done through another channel, then why force it? Do you want order and uniformity, or do you want your team to do its best work?
Do you want your team to be obedient, or do you want them to feel trusted? That leads me to the last agreement…
Accountability
Do you want to know why the methods don’t matter? Because, at the end of the day, the results matter more. The goal has been stated, and the process has been agreed upon. The leader needs to put the team in the best position to succeed by trusting them to get the job done.
That means allowing them to sell with the methods they believe they can execute the best, but it’s also incumbent upon the seller to make sure that those methods are effective. They have the freedom to sell the way they want, so long as the number gets delivered by legal, moral, and ethical means.
That means regular discussions about results and progress. That means honesty, vulnerability, and trust in those meetings about the best path forward for both the team and the individual.
This is not always easy, but it’s absolutely necessary to ensure that the team feels empowered to be individual and authentic while ensuring that those methods are still progressing toward the revenue goal.
Chances are you haven’t had a specific discussion about these three agreements. They can be covered in a single team meeting, and it only takes a couple of months to get through the learning curve of brief monthly accountability meetings.
The results are transformational. What would it look like if everybody on your team was rowing the boat in the same direction? What if everybody felt trusted and empowered to do their very best work the best way they know how? What if the leader could trust that those best efforts were being committed with the right intentions?
You can’t afford to take these things for granted.
