Create a Sales Culture

I had interesting conversations with two clients this week, but it's conversations that happen all the time, about how to increase sales. I'm sure a lot of you have the same discussions every week. How do we increase sales? And the tendency is to look at the sales team - well obviously, it's the sales team that's accountable for sales. So if we need to increase sales, you need to get out there and sell more, sell more, sell more. We always look to the sales team.

But that's too much pressure on one team to build the top line for the organization, and what happens is we end up setting the sales team up for failure. It causes silos within the organization where everybody's looking at sales to solve every problem. Everybody blames sales when revenue isn't what it should be. It causes stress on the sales team and outside the sales team, causes lower results than you want, and everybody focuses on that sales team.

So what's the solution? Shouldn't sales be accountable for sales? Well, partially. But the answer is to build a sales culture throughout the organization. Growing revenue, growing the top line should be everybody's job. Are enough leads - qualified leads - coming from marketing? Is the service team meeting or beating their client retention goals? Do they even have client retention goals? Are you wowing your clients? Are you upselling? Are you getting enough referrals? If you're a products company, do you have the right inventory? Is that inventory on stock? Are you shipping that on time? In finance, are you speeding cash through better handling of invoices? Do you have the right differentiating strategy to drive growth and attract more of the right kinds of clients?

As a leadership team, you need to understand all of the drivers of revenue and how they flow into your organization and through your organization. Better marketing, driving sales, driving service, driving finance, however it flows through your organization - for each piece of that flow, for each one of those drivers, you need to identify the right one or two measures for marketing. Is it marketing qualified leads for sales? It might be new clients and closing ratio for service, it might be client retention, it might be lead time to get a product out the door. What are the right one or two measures for each of those drivers? And then set targets. What does success look like? What does failure look like for each of those targets?

Brainstorm as a team ways to improve each one of those drivers, create a culture where everyone is responsible for sales. Create a culture where everyone is pulling in the same direction to drive the top line.