The Four Foundations Every Sales Leader Must Build With Their Team
- Dan Greenberg
- Oct 13, 2024
- 5 min read
We have all sat through bad meetings. Many of us have also been meeting planners and have spent time trying to find and mold content to fill up a meeting. There are important and foundational activities that sales leaders can use meeting time for that will help drive success and bring a team together. Meetings are important and useful when used correctly.
There are four foundational tools that can be used as the building blocks for organizational or team strategy, and they can be built by leaders with their teams in order to help build consensus on strategy, and learn the market together as a group. Working with your team during team meetings to build these foundations will be a positive use of time and a good experience for your team. The four foundational building blocks are 1) a SWOT based on perception; 2) a Brand Worksheet; 3) A prioritization, and focus hierarchy; 4) and a Business Playbook. Let’s talk about each of them in more detail.
Every sales leader (including front line managers) must build a SWOT based on perception. Leaders and their teams must understand, NOT what is good about your offering, but what the market thinks is good about your offering. It needs to be about understanding NOT what your team’s strengths and deficiencies are, but how the market perceives your team’s strengths and deficiencies. The best way to do this is to compare what your offerings are actually good at with what the market thinks about your offerings, and work with your team to make a decision about whether you want to lean into the market perception, or try to build a new perception. At the end of the session, you should be able to understand the perception you want to enhance or build and the intersection between what your company is good at delivering, your team is good at selling, and your market is interested in.
Every sales leader (including front line managers) must work through a Branding Exercise with their team. it’s not the standard Branding Exercise that every business does with their marketing team and C-Level, which can be about the organization and the product. The sales leader Branding Exercise needs to be about the perceptions of the product and the sales function in market. You and your team must understand how your clients talk about their problems and desired outcomes and the specific terms that they use when they do so. It must be about understanding what your team can teach the market and repeat over and over again so that your sellers become associated with specific phrases and terms that position you in the right way. The best way to do this is to gather a group of sellers and experts and think about what concepts you want to be associated with then speak as if you are the client so that you can consistently define problems and desired outcomes in the way your clients do.
Every sales leader (including front line managers) must work with their team to prioritize clients, messages and internal initiatives. If everything is a priority, then nothing gets prioritized, so it is important to decide where to direct proactive efforts. This does not mean that other types of clients, messages, and initiatives can’t be addressed opportunistically, but the prioritization work guides your team and helps the team understand where to spend time and resources any time there are choices to be made. There is one ideal partner or customer type, and any time your team has a resource deployment choice, it should be made in service of attracting and attaining that customer. There is one offering development initiative or organizational initiative that should be prioritized over all others in order to focus on that one customer type. There are other categories that can be added to this prioritization exercise, but the idea is to understand where to devote proactive effort whenever there is a choice to be made, what to do opportunistically when the situation arises, and what to stay away from even when it presents itself. There is an excellent book by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan called “The ONE Thing” I recommend the read, but in short, it argues that we can be more productive by understanding that ONE thing that will move the ball down the field more than any other thing and maniacally focusing on that ONE thing, because doing anything else takes time away from that ONE Thing. Running a team is hard, and it’s not always easy to truly commit to the one thing, but at the very least, it is imperative to work with your team to know what that one thing is and allow it to be your guiding star.
The output of all the above is a sales playbook. This should be done at the organizational level, and also at the team level. The playbook should be a reference for marketers, sellers, client service, sales support, and sales operations. It should talk about the perceptions and strengths gleaned from the work don't on the perception SWOT. It should define rules of engagement, and how to qualify clients. It should talk about your differentiators, and your competitors’ differentiators. It should talk about common objections and how to handle them. It should talk about client problems, and how they are described by those clients. It should talk about solutions and how they are matched up with problems, but more importantly the outcomes that arise when the solutions are matched up correctly. It should talk about great questions that help engage buyers in the industry you are in, and it should also be full of insights, both bite sized, and more built out, that can be used to build relationships and earn a seat at the table with clients. Having a sales playbook allows for cross functional efficiencies, and knowledge sharing. It helps keep people across the company on brand and on message, and it allows for better test and learn scenarios as people are generally operating in similar ways, so when things are not working, it is easier to identify issues and shift behavior en masse.
Not having a playbook places the onus on the individual sellers and front line managers to be able to refine messaging and, articulate internal needs, and define rules of engagement and prioritization. Although sellers and managers should be able to think through much of this, it is important to work through these strategies as a group and unify the approach. If you don’t you will be watching a bunch of individuals operate in isolation as opposed to leading a unified team.
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