Our World Class Sales Cultures Framework helps leaders assess their sales culture and outlines the areas of focus to help make their organisation world class.
In the fifth part of our Framework, we look at Staffing.
The people in an organisation drive success. How you find, onboard, manage and reward these people are critical when building a world class sales culture.
Right people, right seats
Having the right people in the right seats helps an organisation grow and succeed, but this is something that needs to be checked at regular intervals - and that is what we see in organisations that have a world class sales culture.
These companies will have clear roles and responsibilities for new and existing roles, across the board. They will regularly externally benchmark these, which helps give both the salesperson and the sales manager guidance. By regularly re-assessing these they can ensure they are designed to deliver the current strategy.
In companies that have not defined this, we see the opposite. We see a lack of external benchmarking and a similar lack of re-assessing once people are in a role. This makes it tough to create any kind of competency framework that can drive professional development.
Objective hiring and onboarding
The design of an organisation’s hiring and onboarding process plays a critical part in the sales culture.
In organisations that demonstrate high performance, we see a fully objective hiring process. This will typically use psychometric and behavioural preference assessments to support the hiring process. The skills, experience, attitude and results are all defined and supported by a structured and consistent set of questions to help assess candidates objectively.
These organisations have 30, 60 and 90-day onboarding plans that provide clear expectations of the skills, knowledge and behaviours required for a candidate to be successful in the role. Sales Managers follow the first 90 das closely to accurately assess new starters and remove those that fall below the required standards. As a result, the 12 month attrition rates at these organisations are well below industry averages.
Lower performing organisations will use a traditional interview process with inconsistent questioning and assessment across candidates. New starters won’t have a clear understanding of what is expected of them and, as a result, 12 month attrition rates are high.
Motivation and Incentives
The motivation and incentives plans within a sales team can dive or hinder its success.
In organisations that have embedded a world class sales culture, there will be a variety of incentives, driven by the leaders, and tied back to the motivations of the sales teams. Both pay and commission plans reward performance and provide leverage on key strategic objectives, which makes them work for individuals and the organisation.
In organisations that have not fully considered their motivations and incentives we see incentives limited to commission plans. These are typically exclusively focused on sales results and have no tie back to the strategic objectives of the organisation.
Sales Leaders committed to creating a World Class Sales Culture will find their organisations perform at a much higher level once they have mastered sales management, their approach to coaching and their revenue forecasts.
You can find our previous parts on Sales Operations Strategy, Systems, Sales Leadership and Data and Behaviours within our blog, and you can get in touch with us to discuss our entire World Class Sales Culture framework here, and see how your company scores.
You might also be interested in:
