Transcript: Hi, I’m Anna Talerico with Married2Growth and I want to talk about putting your sales team in a bubble. A perfect bubble filled with rainbows and glitter and puppy dogs and only wonderful things.
As a founder who led the sales team, I considered one of my primary responsibilities to shield them from the chaos of the real world. Sales is a profession that requires incredible focus, grit, positivity, and discipline. It’s a numbers game, it’s a skills game, and in so many ways, it’s a mental game. But so often I see executives who don’t understand this. They run their sales teams ragged with internal meetings, information overload, with shifts and tweaks to strategies and messaging and packaging and pricing and re-orgs and everything in between.
Those are things that happen in the real world and we can’t avoid them. But to keep sales focused on what matters most—selling and acquiring new customers—these distractions need to be synthesized, summarized, and boiled down to just the essentials.
The sales team doesn’t need to be in every meeting. They need to be in the right meetings. The sales team doesn’t need to sit around and hear about half-finished ideas, theories or strategies. They need to know just the information that impacts them. I am not talking about being opaque. You can lead with transparency and still insulate your sales team from needless distraction. When it comes time for a positioning change or a messaging update, package it for easy consumption. Communicate changes and updates in a concise manner. Keep it to the point and only include what matters to selling. Document it in a quick reference and pop it into the sales playbook as well.
Simply framing changes and updates through the sales lens can help tremendously, providing just why it matters to sales and what the sales team needs to know. For example, I would often have a quick huddle with my sales team after company-wide meetings to synthesize just the most salient points for them, like a verbal quick recap so they could toss out the rest and retain what mattered most. I would boil down a one-hour all-hands packed full of information into a 5-minute recap for them, so that would be what they would retain.
In a fast-growing tech company, there are a million ways to distract your sales team if you aren’t vigilant. Sales executives, and really all company leadership, should be stepping in front of distractions to constantly clear the path for the sales team. I really do see this as a core responsibility of company executives, sales VPs, and even sales managers. It’s the key to a high-performing sales department. Block and tackle for your team, insulate them from the inevitable company drama and distractions that pop up, be the champion for them and be their advocate inside of your organization. That’s how you win. And that’s what I attribute our sales efficiency to.
So, that’s it for now. I hope this was helpful, and I hope you will join me over on the Married2Growth blog where I write, and talk, about lots of stuff just like this.
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