Quick Take: How to Keep Your Sales Team Happy & Productive

In this Quick Take episode, we’re breaking down how to keep your sales team happy and productive. 

You’ll not only learn why employee happiness and productivity go hand-in-hand, but also actionable ways to increase morale and sales numbers at the same time.

LINKS:

Matt Sunshine

The Center for Sales Strategy

Chapters

• 0:05 Tips for Keeping Sales Team Happy
• 7:43 Keeping Sales Team Up to Date

Transcript

Matt Sunshine: 0:05

Welcome to Improving Sales Performance, a podcast highlighting tips and insights aimed at helping sales organizations realize, and maybe even exceed, their goals. Here we chat with thought leaders, experts and gurus who have years of sales experience from a wide range of industries. I'm your host, matt Sunshine, ceo at the Center for Sales Strategy, a sales performance consulting company. In this Quick Take episode, we're breaking down how to keep your sales team happy and productive. You'll not only learn why employee happiness and productivity go hand in hand, but also actionable ways to increase morale and sales numbers at the same time. With that, let's get started. So it's really important to drive productivity in a sales department. Everyone knows that. But there is an absolute correlation between employee happiness, employee engagement and productivity. They actually go hand in hand. They actually go hand in hand. A happy employee, an engaged employee, is more productive than someone who's not happy and not engaged. So how do you do that? So let me give you a few ways that you could. You could increase engagement, increase happiness with your team. So, number one create an effective onboarding process so important the way you enter a business, the way you enter a company. Estimated that 90% of employees decide whether they want to stay with a company within their first six months and 16.45% actually leave within their first week. Think about that for a second. It takes a lot of time. There's a lot of thought that goes into the whole recruitment process and the selection process. So if you go through all of that and you know 16% of the people that get hired leave in their first week, wow, that's too much. That's way too much. So you want to have happier and more engaged employees. One of the best things you can do is create an effective onboarding program. The second thing is have an open door communication policy. You know you can really counterbalance blind optimism, right? I mean it's blind. Optimism is sometimes frustrating for people. You know everything's fine, you know everything will be okay. When it really isn't, especially, I mean it's kind of being a little tone deaf and by letting your team know that, hey, bad things are happening, or sales aren't where they need to be, or revenue isn't where they need to be, or expenses are out of control, by letting them know that that's happening, it's good, it's also okay. You need to let them know that it's okay for them to come in your office you have an open door and share with you a conversation that they had with a customer or something where it didn't go so well. If all you ever hear is the really good stuff, well then you're not really getting very deep and it's just going to allow for frustration to happen, and people are frustrated. They're not going to be as happy and engaged as you really want them. That's important.

Matt Sunshine: 4:14

Also, ask your folks how they want to be managed. You know it might seem like a little weird to ask them how they want to be managed, but we really believe. I mean we have some tools at the Center for Sales Strategy and Up your Culture, our division of our company that focuses on company culture and employee engagement. We have some tools called like the growth guide, where we actually encourage you to sit down with your folks and ask them how they want to be managed. What's important to them? What would they want a manager to do or not do? So asking your team how they want to be managed is key.

Matt Sunshine: 5:01

It's such an important thing, and the next thing you can do to really encourage more of a culture of engaged, happy employees is eliminate tasks that are not necessary. I mean, especially in a sales department, if you could cut down on any of the tedious steps or any of the little minutiae things that you're asking your folks to do that would allow them to go out and sell more. It's good for you, it's good for them. They're happier they're producing more. You're happier, they're producing more. A lot of times we have tedious steps in our organization because they've just been kind of Frankensteined in there. Right, they're just. That's the way we do it here, because that's the way we've always done it here. Well, maybe that's a system or a process from 15 years ago or 20 years ago. That's really not necessary today. Or maybe there's a better way that you can do it.

Matt Sunshine: 6:04

And the next thing I would recommend is to get to know your staff individually, knowing what motivates them and what drives them, investing in their talent, knowing them individually and knowing what their individual strengths are, so that you can set them up for success. So that you can set them up for success. If one person is really good with project management and another person isn't. Maybe there's a way to pair people together so that you're getting the most out of everybody. And the last thing for today to share and boy. There's a lot of things you can do to encourage employee engagement and employee happiness, and certainly you know, if you want more information on that, we have a great blog over at our Up your Culture website that talks about this stuff every single week, producing just great content.

Matt Sunshine: 7:07

But one thing that you can absolutely do is keep your team up to date with changes going on. Right, you've got to keep your sales team or any team for that matter in the loop when it comes to any product changes or service changes. You don't want them to be caught off guard. You want them to be the first to know, not the last to know. You want them to be in the loop and make them feel as though they're a really important part of the process, of what we're doing around here.

Matt Sunshine: 7:43

When you don't include them or they find out through the grapevine, it's frustrating for them and they don out through the grapevine. It just it's. It's frustrating for them and they don't feel as though they're. They're um that they matter, and you want to make sure that you're showing them they matter, and one of the best ways to do that is keeping them up to date with any changes or improvements um that that you have going on improvements, um that that you have going on. This has been improving sales performance. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, join us every week by clicking the subscribe button for more on the topics covered in the show. Visit our website, the center for sales strategycom. There you can find helpful resources and content aimed at improving your sales performance.