Create a Healthy Culture in Your Sales Organization

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define responsibilities for creating team culture.
  
• Explain methods for creating a healthy sales culture.
  

Who Takes Responsibility for Building Company Culture?

To create a healthy and thriving company culture, everyone—from the chief revenue officer (CRO) and VP to the sales managers and team members—needs to be involved and invested. In other words, culture-building is a collaborative effort. 

Responsibilities in this collaboration differ depending on the role. Here’s a high-level overview of who does what in culture-building:

• CRO: Sets vision for the sales team and helps craft policies that guide performance and engagement.
  
• VP: Crafts actionable ways to execute the CRO’s vision and guidelines for adhering to policy. Regularly meets with managers to gauge the success of both.
  
• Sales manager: Follows guidelines and policies set forth by the CRO and VP, reminds team of vision and policies, gauges team morale, and solicits feedback.
  
• Team member: Listens to the vision, understands policies, and works in accordance with both. Offers feedback to managers when co-workers don’t engage in a way consistent with vision or policy.
  

This is an overview, of course. More concrete direction comes in the next section when we talk about how to live out the six core pillars of a healthy company culture. 

How to Make Your Sales Culture Hum

In the last unit, we described the six key elements of a healthy culture: data-driven decision making, collaboration and open communication, continuous improvement, empathy, a customer-centric focus, and healthy competition. Now let’s talk about how to integrate those into your own company culture.

Data-driven decision making

There are two key elements to successful data-driven decision making: setting an expectation for the team that decisions need to be backed up by accurate data, and implementing a tool (like a CRM) that allows you to collect and analyze sales data easily.

The first part of the equation starts with leadership. Set the expectation that you and your team will track data across all stages of the sales process, as well as after-sales customer engagement. This data includes prospecting records, customer contact information, purchase details, leads in the pipeline, deal close rates, service requests, and anything else that you can use to build customer and prospect relationships. The importance of tracking this data should be reiterated at team meetings and emphasized during pipeline reviews and one-on-ones.

Second, find a CRM that allows you to store sales data easily while also providing AI-driven insights. Sales Cloud is designed for this, giving you intuitive dashboards, easy-to-access and real-time pipeline updates, revenue intelligence metrics, and opportunity insights afforded by the Einstein AI engine. 

Collaboration and open communication

As the old saying goes, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” In other words, collaboration—fueled by open communication—allows teams to share information and benefit from each other’s skills, knowledge, and experience.

Central to this is transparency. As one study from Slack noted, “In an increasingly interconnected world, transparency is the new gold standard.” Openly discussing challenges and solutions empowers your team to improve together.

Leaders should set an example here. During weekly meetings, invite team members to discuss noteworthy successes (like quickly closed deals or deftly handled complaint resolution) and what they believe facilitated their success.

You can do the same with failures. Get permission from one of your employees to share a project that didn’t work out, and then talk with the team about what went wrong and how it could have been turned into a success. Remember: This isn’t a punishment—it’s a chance to empower and support employees across the sales organization.

It’s important to be open during one-on-one meetings, too. This is the time to provide feedback on what employees are doing well and coach them on what they could do better. Don’t speak in generalities, though—give each employee concrete takeaways they can use to improve their work.

Also, encourage your entire team to give you feedback—either in private, or in team meetings when feedback is solicited. This transparency and accountability makes it clear you’re also invested in your own improvement—and that the company’s success depends on transparency at all levels.

Continuous improvement

A company can’t grow without employees who don’t grow. Continuous improvement, or the honing of skills and abilities central to one’s job, touches all levels of a sales organization and is the key to innovation and business growth. In most companies, it’s referred to simply as professional development.

There are several ways to engage in professional development and improvement exercises, and many are free. Here are some common ones popular among sales organizations:

• Developing mentor/mentee relationships between leadership and sales staff
  
• Leading book clubs or group study on a trending sales topic
  
• Subsidizing coursework for employees who want to improve specific skills
  
• Offering self-study courses, like those on Trailhead
  
• Attending sales conferences to learn new strategies and techniques
  
• Reading or assigning articles on the latest sales technology
  
• Attending networking events for sales professionals
  

Perhaps most importantly, leaders should repeat the critical message that continuous improvement is valued. Encourage your team to research professional development opportunities that interest them and suggest opportunities for individual employees during one-on-ones.

Recognition is part of this equation. Acknowledge employees who put effort into developing their skills and abilities and reward them with cash, days off, or other meaningful kudos that show you’re serious about professional development.

They’ll thank you with increased productivity: According to HR Technologist and Harvard Business Review, 40% of employed Americans say they would put more energy into their work if they were recognized more often.

Empathy

There are questions that everyone in a sales organization can ask themselves to build an empathetic mindset and foster empathetic communication.

Whether you’re speaking to an employee or a customer, get in the habit of taking a breath and pausing before responding or reaching out. As you do, consider these questions:

• What drives or motivates this person?
  
• What is their stress level?
  
• Do I fully appreciate the context of their problem or situation? If not, how can I get the full picture so I can communicate appropriately?
  
• What factors are influencing this person’s mood and communication? How can I take these into account when framing my communication?
  
• If I were in this person’s shoes, what would I be thinking and how would I communicate?
  

For example, a sales manager may call a rep into her office for a weekly one-on-one only to find he’s irritable. His answers are short and he seems to have no patience for the manager’s questions. 

A good manager might take a breath and ask the rep what’s going on, noting that they seem a little on edge. They might then ask how they can help the employee, which will make them feel supported.

It’s important to note that empathy isn’t about feeling what other people feel, but rather appreciating their circumstances and looking at situations from their perspective. When you can do this successfully, you become more understanding. This leads to trust, which allows you to build stronger, longer-lasting relationships.

Customer-centric focus

At the end of the day, happy customers drive company success. That’s why Salesforce has long emphasized a customer-centric approach. But, what does that look like in practice for a sales team?

Meetings, pitch prep, demos, calls, emails—anything that impacts a customer—should be grounded in these core considerations:

• What outcomes are they looking for?
  
• What needs do they have?
  
• What problems are they facing?
  
• How do they define success and failure?
  
• How do they like to communicate?
  
• What are their current circumstances?
  

With these top of mind, everything you do for a customer will align with their goals, even if it’s just a passing email. 

It’s also important to think of the customer as more than just a business entity. Behind every business relationship is a person with a wealth of business ups and downs. Keep this in mind, especially as you frame your communications. (Remember: Lead with empathy.)

Healthy competition

Olympians are an ideal model for healthy competition in business. Silver medal winner Bob Berland said as much in a 2021 interview with Salesforce: “Competitive athletes like to compete, and sales is a competitive job, far more competitive than being a CPA and auditing the books. You go out, you get the deal, you bring it in. You close the sale. You win.”

Leaders should foster this sense of competition—while ensuring it inspires growth, not divisiveness.

Here are a few ways to make that happen:

• Host “goal races” that target specific goals, like a set number of closed deals in a quarter. Each rep that hits their goal gets a prize. To make it fun and engaging, create a race board in a visible location (or on a website) and allow team members to create their own avatars. As members hit the defined goals, move their avatar along the board. Give away prizes as they hit certain milestones. Some fun ideas:
  

• Free lunch
  
• Dress-down day
  
• Gift card
  
• Travel voucher
  

• Establish weekly or monthly “celebration” meetings where you acknowledge high achievers on the team. The achievements don’t have to be directly related to sales—you can applaud employees who invest the most in professional development activities, or those who are the most engaged in team social events. Mix it up each week and announce the upcoming “celebration category” early so employees can gear up for the excitement.
  
• Establish small groups for some light and fun competition. Have the teams compete for categories such as most customers onboarded, largest sales amount, and most closed deals during a quarter. Keep track on a leaderboard, and reward the winners with cash or a prize. The next quarter, mix up the teams so reps learn to work with others in the organization.
  

These are just a few ways to foster healthy competition and reward achievements in the workplace. Encourage individual team members to beat their personal bests while also rooting for their team. This camaraderie lends itself to a fun, healthy, and productivity sales culture. 

You now have the basic tools you need to foster a culture of collaboration and a strong growth mindset. With a healthy, productive culture in place, you’re well on your way to unbeatable productivity, high morale, and business success.

Resources

• Salesforce Site: Sales Cloud Overview
• Salesforce Workbook: Sales Coaching Workbook
• Salesforce Site: Trailhead 
• External Site: Harvard Business Review: Recognizing Employees Is the Simplest Way to Improve Morale
• Salesforce Blog Post: Many Athletes End Up in Corporate Sales Jobs—Here’s Why