Empowering Your Sales Team: Building a Strategy Together for Lasting Success

In today’s competitive market, the success of your sales strategy hinges not just on the tactics you employ but on the buy-in and commitment of your sales team. Traditional top-down approaches often fall short, leading to resistance and lackluster results.

To drive consistent performance and foster a culture of ownership, it’s essential to involve your team in the creation of your sales strategy.

By leveraging your team’s ideas and experiences, you not only gain diverse perspectives but also cultivate a sense of ownership that propels everyone towards a unified goal. Here’s how managers can collaboratively build a sales strategy, which will ensure alignment, engagement, and sustained success.

The Power of Collaborative Strategy Building

When a sales strategy is imposed without team involvement, it often faces resistance. “I’m already hitting my number. Why should I change my approach?”

Salespeople are diverse in their approaches and thinking styles; a one-size-fits-all strategy does not address individual strengths, individuality and personal style.

When your team is part of the creation process, they are more likely to embrace the collective strategy of universal best practices. Now, they have a personal investment in its success, and ownership in the process. And what people own, they act on.

What people create they own. And what they own, they act on.

This collaborative approach taps into the collective wisdom of your team, leading to more effective and adaptable strategies that resonate with real-world selling conditions.

Six Steps Designing to Get Your Salespeople To Own Their Selling Strategy

1. Initiate the Creation Process by Enrolling Your Team

The first step is to actively involve your team in the strategy creation process. Communicate the importance of their participation and how their insights are invaluable for crafting a strategy that will help them achieve their most important goals. This initial enrollment sets the tone for collaboration and reinforces that their contributions are both needed and respected.

To tap into the power of your team, use the following steps to guide the conversation:

2. Materials: Have a Whiteboard or Flip Charts in Front of Your Team: Visual aids like whiteboards will organize thoughts, ensure alignment and foster a collaborative environment. They serve as a central point for brainstorming and mapping out ideas, one step at a time. If done remotely, you can leverage a shared document or remote white board instead.

3. Define the Steps of Your Sales Process Until There’s Alignment: If you spoke to practically any sales team, you’d find each salesperson has a different take on the sales process. When everyone is doing something different, it makes it impossible to scale best processes and practices, especially in a growing organization.

Encourage your team to outline the current sales process ensuring each person has an opportunity to contribute. Discuss each step in detail, ensuring everyone’s understanding and agreement.

This alignment is crucial for identifying areas of improvement and ensuring concussion before going deeper into the strategy and language of selling.

The Universal Law: People resist what they hear, but believe what they say.

4. Break Down Each Step into Into a Detailed Communication Strategy:

While breaking down your sales process is essential, what distinguishes a well designed sales process, and a generic sales process outline is the actual language and talk tracks under each step in your sales process. After all, like leadership, selling is a language that the top salespeople master.

Consider the common scenario. If you have an A player and a C player who are doing the same amount of activity, then it’s not the steps that are the problem. Is what they’re doing and saying during every step that distinguishes a salesperson from a sales champion.

Now is when you get to dive deeper into each step by dissecting the specific activities, questions, messaging and communication to create best practices. This granular approach helps in pinpointing exactly what works, what’s missing and what needs adjustment, ensuring that every aspect of the sales process is optimized.

For example, lets say your sales process looks something like this.

1. Opening

2. Discovery

3. Gain consensus

4. Provide solution and/or

5. Schedule next steps

Here’s the opportunity to take this skeleton or outline of a sales process, and go deeper around what needs to be achieved during each step and more importantly, how to do so by identifying essential sales conversations. For example:

Opening: What would that sound like?

Discovery. What are the most important questions to ask? What not to ask?

Offer Solution/ P.O.C., Demo: How are you managing your meetings? What does your messaging sound like?

Confirm Next Steps: What further qualification and confirmation is needed? What would that sound like?

Defuse Hidden Objections: What are the final questions salespeople need to ask before concluding the meeting? What strategy is used to uncover initial objections or concerns before moving to the next step?

5. Assign Accountability Partners to Ensure Follow-Through: After creating the sales process and developed full alignment with your team, pair team members with an accountability partner.

This partnership fosters mutual support and ensures that the agreed-upon strategies are implemented consistently. Accountability partners help maintain momentum, provide peer coaching, and address any obstacles that arise.

6. Ongoing Coaching and Training: Even the best strategies can falter without ongoing support. Regular check-ins, feedback and one to one coaching sessions, and continuous training are essential to reinforce the strategy and address any emerging challenges. Sustained support ensures that the strategy remains relevant and effective, preventing it from becoming just another fleeting initiative or flavor of the month.

When you have the path to success, it’s easy to determine who is deviating from the path, and who is following it all the way to the sale.

Pushing a new strategy without team involvement often leads to resistance. Salespeople have diverse methods and preferences; a strategy that doesn’t consider these differences is likely to fail. By involving the team, you respect their individuality and harness their unique approaches, leading to a more adaptable and resilient strategy.

Encouraging your team to own the strategy fosters alignment with the new direction. When team members feel responsible for the strategy’s success, they are more motivated to execute it effectively. This sense of ownership drives commitment and enhances overall performance.

Now, the strategy is not just a directive, but a shared vision that everyone works towards achieving together.