1-Minute Mastery: How to Build a Dynamic Sales Culture

A dynamic sales culture exists when every employee puts every customer and prospect ahead of personal concerns, comforts and considerations. Survey Employees The best place to start building a dynamic sales culture is for the sales manager to ask everyone – from the CEO to the janitorial staff, from receptionists to parts counter people, from the controller to the security guard – for their opinions on how a dynamic sales culture should look. An employee survey helps a sales manager move the company forward because it not only reveals the baseline from which people need to be educated and motivated, it also begins building consensus on how important a dynamic sales culture can be to the overall success of the company. Survey Customers and Prospects A customer/prospect survey provides insights from the best possible sources about how to build a viable dynamic sales culture. At the same time, customer/prospect surveys can and often do generate unexpected new sales and profits. To elicit the most information in the least amount of time, questions should be limited to the following four: “What do you know about our company and what do you think about what you know?” “Which of our products and services are important to you and which are not?” “What do you think of our advertising and promotional campaigns?” “What would it take for you to do business with us?” Customer/prospect surveys can be conducted in any of the following formats or combinations thereof:

• Face-to-face Interviews – allow for a dialogue to promote in-depth answers, give questioners the chance to integrate product literature into the survey when appropriate, watch for body-language signals and double-check answers for accuracy.
• FAX or Direct Mail Interviews – are costly, time consuming and don’t generate more than a five to ten percent response rate.
• Online Interviews – are inexpensive but often result in poor response rates unless surveying companies offer incentives.
• Telephone Interviews – are cheaper than face-to-face interviews but don’t give interviewers the ability to develop in-depth answers or to monitor and assess body-language signals.

Discuss Survey Results with Employees A dynamic sales culture requires strong support mechanisms to manage the flow of employee actions and reactions from the moment of customer/prospect contact to the point of disengagement. In order to create and sustain a dynamic sales culture, employees must understand, acknowledge and resolve to answer concerns expressed by current customers, former customers and prospects in their answers to survey questions. Get and Keep the Dynamic Sales Culture ‘Buy-in’ As management and employees discuss why, how and when to design and implement a dynamic sales culture, management has to understand that it can’t necessarily count on every ‘nodder’ and ‘smiler’ in the room to step out of a comfort zones to put the needs of difficult customers and prospects ahead of their own. Weekly department meetings, monthly company meetings and quarterly follow-up customer/prospect surveys can build in accountability to help monitor and course-correct a dynamic sales culture. Epilogue A dynamic sales culture cannot and will not be built quickly. People change slowly and slow change is typically the best change because it tends to be more lasting. Even after a dynamic sales culture is up and running, it will require constant attention from everyone – from the top to the bottom of the organizational chart – to enable the company to consistently increase revenues and profits.

1-Minute Mastery: How to Build a Dynamic Sales Culture Find more on: MasterMindSEO.org

This post originally appeared on
http://mastermindseo.org/1-minute-mastery-build-dynamic-sales-culture/