You have always wanted to build a top-performing sales team. Elite sales teams that do not just close deals with their skills and strategy. But instead, what sets them apart from low performing teams is their psychology, emotional intelligence, mindset and more.
Let us delve deeper into key psychological characteristics that make all the difference for top-performing teams and how you can take this understanding to build your dream team that you can count on.
1. How growth mindset fuels long term success
What is growth mindset?
A belief that your skills and wisdom will make help you learn, grow, and adapt refers to growth mindset. Below pointers sum up growth mindset in brief:
- Asking continuous feedback to improvise
- Acquiring skills as much as possible
- Viewing challenges as opportunities to learn and grow
- Believing that the best deal is yet to come
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How growth mindset can help you get better
- Makes you believe that every rejection is one step forward: A frozen mindset will always make you think “I am not good at this.” Instead, a growth mindset transforms this fixed mindset to “What can I learn from this failure?”
- Opens the door to better coaching: Feedback looks like failure to a rep with fixed mindset. On the contrary, growth mindset reps invite honest feedback and apply it practically.
- Encourages loyalty: Sales professionals with growth mindset tend to stay with an organization in tough times and are always ready to take on new challenges.
What it takes to cultivate a growth mindset in sales
- Normalize giving and receiving feedback between managers, peers, and sales reps.
- Track every individual’s personal development over a period by rating them on their objection handling skills or deal conversion ratio.
- Use the word “yet” more: This shows that though you are not adept at a certain skill at the moment, you are in a learning state.
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2. The power of intrinsic motivation
Why is intrinsic motivation important?
Paves a way for persistence: Rejection is inevitable part of sales. However, representatives with strong intrinsic motivation grow because:
- They don’t see rejections as personal failures.
- They understand the overall sales process, and not just result.
- Leads to greater involvement: When motivation comes from within, they
- Give genuine feedback in team meetings.
- Work after office hours just because they want meaningful impact
- It drives team curious: Curious reps are always curious to know the reason behind customer’s rejection. This curiosity and creativity come only when you are motivated from within.
Pillars of intrinsic motivation
- Autonomy: When sales people feel empowered to make their own decisions and trustworthy, their motivation rises. Furthermore, this makes them feel emotionally invested in their work and their creativity flourishes in long term.
- Mastery: Mastery is a complete game-changer because it enhances confidence in sellers and make them consistent and adaptable.
- Purpose: Motivated sellers always believe that their work can bring change not just for company, their earnings but also for their prospects. These sellers genuinely focus on solving a problem for their customer to bring business transformation.
Ways to cultivate intrinsic motivation
- Try to understand what makes every sales representative feel motivated and fuels them to give their best.
- Celebrate curious and creative employees when they ask out-of-the-box questions or try something new.
3. Psychological Safety: The foundation of culture
What is psychological safety?
A shared perspective within a sales team that it’s not punishable to share concerns, asking questions, give and receive feedback or sharing opinions or ideas is referred as psychological safety.
A sales organization where psychological safety is high, employees showcase improved efficiency and accelerated learning.
How to foster psychological safety in sales team
- Lead with vulnerability: Normalize sharing your failure stories, mistakes, and learnings to realize that it is fine for humans to make errors.
- Demonstrate the courage to try: When someone within the team speaks up or admits his or her fault, make them feel comfortable and ask follow up questions instead of being sarcastic to them.
- Every mistake is one step forward: Instead of criticizing or firing a sales rep when something goes wrong, try to understand what did he learn and how did it happen in the first place.
- Make feedback a habit: Giving and receiving feedback should be embedded in team flow. Constructive feedback fuels growth within the team and helps them deliver exceptional results.
- Reward progress, not just results: Sales professionals who dare to take a smart risk, helped others, or bounced back stronger after a rejection should always be appreciated since improving is equally important as achieving.
4. Emotional resilience offers competitive advantage
What is emotional resilience?
The ability to keep yourself focused and humble despite facing rejections is what helps you become a great salesperson.
Emotional resilience helps reps to:
- Stay calm and composed in high pressure situations
- Turn failures into opportunities
- Remain optimistic on tough days
How to build emotional resilience
- Think about the whole team, and not just yourself: Great sales reps don’t isolate themselves on bad days, instead they talk openly about their struggles with peers.
- Prioritize mental recovery by taking short breaks in between and practicing meditation to shed emotional baggage.
- Understand that rejection is a part of the process. One should not take it to their heart and work on improving themselves.
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5. Managers guide to build emotional resilience within team
- Talk about emotional side of sales: Managers should encourage employees to talk about how they are feeling, instead of just talking about work.
- Failure is welcome: No one in the team should be afraid of failing even if they are not able to deliver immediate results. Managers need to celebrate efforts put in by the sales reps.
- Share resilience stories: By talking about their struggle stories and how they bounced back stronger, leads can ensure to develop emotional maturity within the sales team.
Emotional resilience nowadays is not a secondary skill, but rather an essential capability to be mastered.
6. Peer accountability navigates results
What is peer accountability?
When team members hold each other accountable to contribute towards shared goals to help team achieve collective success. This creates a sense of ownership and mutual trust within the team.
However, majority of people associate peer accountability with micro management. Instead, it is important because:
- It keeps the team members inspired
- It strengthens team cohesion.
Why peer accountability
- It builds encouraging push among reps to drive their team to the tower of success by putting their best foot forward.
- It creates a sense of belongingness to raise the bar, accept feedback and have a strong identity.
- It encourages knowledge sharing within the team where every rep teaches peers and celebrate each other.
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How to cultivate peer accountability within sales team
- Celebrate contribution of colleagues by not focusing on individual wins. This helps build a collaborative culture within the company wherein every employee wants to help his/her peers.
- Peer a new hire with an experienced professional to enforce a culture of enhanced learning and feedback.
- Utilizing dashboards to track progress allows peers to appreciate both small and big wins. It leads to fewer surprises and builds a culture of transparency within the team.
7. Preparation is power: The formula of confidence
The ability to deal prospects with a calm attitude and moving forward without getting rude is what is called being prepared. When you go prepared, you deliver with clarity and guide customers with authentic confidence.
Clarity drives performance by:
- Enabling representatives to know “why” behind every query and make better decisions.
- Building customers’ trust when a sales representative answers their question in a crisp and concise manner and understands their needs properly.
How to build clarity and capability
- Practice scenarios on real life negotiations and garner feedback from peers or manager.
- Ensure to do proper research before every call so that you go all prepared.
- Focus on modern playbooks that are action oriented and not just a 50-page pdf with theoretical information.
Finally, confidence is not a characteristic but an outcome for someone who can lead the customer in every situation without being nervous and does not fumble.
8. Focus on progress over perfection
Most of the sales companies focus only on celebrating big wins thus creating a high-pressure environment and employees feeling burned out.
It’s important to celebrate progress of employees because:
- It encourages consistency within the employees and motivates them to work harder.
- Celebrating small wins motivates them to keep going and makes them feel appreciated.
- It helps in building a growing culture within the organization wherein every employee feels proud of the efforts they are putting in.
How to celebrate success
- Badges: Employees should be given badges or certain titles whenever they achieve a certain benchmark or demonstrate significant improvements
- Feedback: Managers should have regular one to one session and appreciate employees for their contribution instead of just talking about numbers.
- Shoutouts: By taking out 5 minutes at the start of every call to give a shoutout to best performers in terms of best cold call, most innovative idea, sales team feels motivated.
Focusing on progress over perfection will accelerate learning among employees, and boost their overall morale and outcomes.
