Introduction
Selling is a discipline that requires a lot of effort. It’s not enough to show up at the office and do your job daily. You need to be focused on achieving results, especially if you want to climb the corporate ladder. But for salespeople to be successful, they need more than just the tools and resources available in their organisation; they also need some vision for where the company is going and how their role fits into achieving it.
A shared vision enables sales excellence.
A shared vision is a common, shared understanding of what success looks like. It’s an understanding so clear and well-defined that it can be easily communicated to others—even those outside the sales team.
A shared vision helps align individual goals with the organisation’s broader objectives. This can improve teamwork, increase motivation and performance, and create more straightforward problem-solving for teams working toward a shared goal.
Creating a shared vision is challenging; it takes time, energy, and commitment from leadership and frontline employees like you who help turn your company’s strategy into actionable tasks that impact the bottom line daily. But when you create one together (and keep it up-to-date), everyone will benefit because everyone knows what they need to do their part for your business’s overall strategic goals to become a reality!
Making your sales team succeed
Many things can help your sales team succeed, but at the heart of it, they need to share a vision and set goals. This is especially true when you’re building an internal sales team. You want to motivate your people so they can do their best work and sell more products or services for you. Here’s how to do that:
- A shared vision. Your company should have a clear mission statement and values by which everyone operates. If those need to be more precise, consider creating posters that can be displayed throughout your office space so that everyone sees them every day when coming to work (or as often as possible). Another idea is using software like Salesforce Trailhead for quizzes on company history or other facts about why it does what it does today (here’s one example from our friends at HubSpot).
- Goals. Create quarterly goals for each person on the team based on their role in helping attain those objectives—and ensure they’re appropriate! For example: If someone works out front answering phones while someone else handles backend customer support requests over email only once in a while during off hours…then their target might not be realistic because there isn’t enough overlap between what both roles accomplish each quarter.”
They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.
Most organisations continue to do this in sales by applying more and more pressure on their sales teams. For example, many set a goal for performance improvement without doing the necessary work to get there and then use the low results as an excuse to blame their salespeople. Inevitably, this backfires, leading to disengaged employees and even softer results.
The solution is simple: stop trying to change your people’s behaviour. Instead, focus on changing their mindset so they can achieve what you want them to achieve—and enjoy doing it! The good news? You don’t need new training programs or fancy technology tools (like AI); you only need your shared vision statement.
Bottom-Line
As a sales leader, it’s your job to create a shared vision to help your team achieve its goals. The most effective way to do this is by developing strong relationships with each individual on your team and understanding their motivations. You can also use goal-setting and performance-management principles to motivate them towards success.
Who am I?
I am Dotun Adeoye, a Business Growth Strategist & Author of the 5 Pillars of Business Growth.
I’ve built up my experience via serial entrepreneurship, consulting leadership roles in business growth, business development and product innovation in large companies worldwide in the last 29 years.
Today, I consult with large businesses on how to sustainably grow their businesses, sustain infinite growth, ensure business continuity and achieve a legacy.
Hire Dotun Adeoye to Speak Virtually or In – Person at your company’s event to cover this or other topics. You can also get in touch via +44 203 097 1718
