Episode 13: The Energy Approach to Building a High Performing Sales Team

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And engaged teams, stronger sales Teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered B2B sales teams. So the topic of today is all around the TeamSTEPPS playbook and the E for Energy as part of that word step. Before we get into it though, I want to share a story. It was a really interesting moment I had this afternoon with one of the sales leaders who I coach in an engineering discipline. This person has a small team, there's about four people in that team and they're having troubles with a high performing salesperson who isn't towing the company line, who isn't playing with his teammates and with the rest of the business as you'd expect that team member to do. The problem is that they are an exceptionally strong salesperson and and delivering really high numbers. So the conversation with this sales leader was what do you do, what can you accept and what can't you accept? And I think without going to any real details, what we both agreed on was that whilst individuals can have their uniqueness be present in a team and there will be certain elements of a team that won't work for them, they in general need to be stepping in the same direction as the rest of that group. We celebrate uniqueness, we celebrate individualism and however, we don't celebrate when one individual can have an impact that's negative on the rest of the team regardless of their performance. Now I haven't known these sales leader for an extended period of time. However, one thing that really resonated with me was their commitment to making sure that as a team they head in the one direction and that regardless of your performance levels, you need to be supporting that team and ensuring its growth rather than detracting from it. So we're going to talk about this a little bit further in a minute. But for me, I thought it was a nice way to start because I think as sales leaders, we've all had brilliant salespeople that are incredibly difficult to manage, but struggle with understanding where to draw the line between acceptable levels of individualism and unacceptable levels. Okay, so let's get into today's podcast. Three weeks ago, we introduced four key habits that consistently drive the success of sales leaders. I won't go into detail again today because we've gone through them a few times, but they are absolutely having a robust, repeatable sales process that teams buy into. I focus on a team step playbook, right, which includes three key levers that drive drive out a fourth around peak performance measurement. So they have a form of measurement metrics, and I've thrown a few quotes in there over the last few weeks as well, that essentially govern their team's performance and allows them to analyze how they're tracking. A note on this because we're going to get into this over the coming weeks. Too many metrics and metrics that are too complicated can be seriously detracting to a team. So as we get into this, you'll see a very simple approach that we take with our coaching partners and the people that we work with that allows you to have a measurement model that's actually repeatable and decodable. Right? One that everyone can understand. And last but not least, of those four key habits was a long term focus on training. So that's coaching in particular, but also skills around business skills, selling skills and technical skills, and an accountability within a team to make sure that training happens. Okay, so we've gone through the sales process training. We are well and truly into our TeamSTEPPS playbook. We've gone through S for strategy, T for talent, and now we're up to energy, which is the last of our key levers that drive P, which is peak performance for your team. So we know that when the TeamSTEPPS playbook is handled well that it's a really nice alternative to the standard, somewhat sterile strategic planning processes that most businesses go through. Get strategy right, get talent right, and get energy right, and you have an environment that is highly likely to hit peak performance. We've gone through strategy in great detail. We've gone through. So strategy being essentially the strategic structures and principles and supporting tools that you have to allow the business to function. Talent, that's the type of people that you have in your business and how you develop them, both externally, bringing them in externally and internally, fostering growth. Last but not least is energy. Energy is the Lever of the model that we focus on weekly, if not daily, where strategy, we're focusing on yearly with a big session and then half yearly or quarterly reviews and talent, we're looking at a monthly type of focus. Energy really is something that comes in day to day to day. There's an old Babe Ruth saying that I love. It's hard to beat a person who never gives up. And for me, that is a really nice way to describe energy in a team. High energy levels. People that come in, they're resilient, they want to work hard, and they're absolutely driving for success. Often hit success, right? They step into the shoes that they want to fulfill. That said, sales leaders, we have all experienced the yo yoing of energy levels in teams. Anything from real excitement down to somewhat despair, right? And the despair generally tends to come around when they've lost big deals or sales numbers are poor. We're having major delivery issues or product issues. Right? When you don't get it right, though, the impact of low energy is can have a huge impact across not just an individual, but also a team and even into an organization. So we know that getting energy right is really important. But how do we create that environment where energy levels can be high as consistently as possible? Well, again, like the strategy and like the talent levers of the TeamSTEPPS playbook, there's about 16 to 18 ideas that we have as a business that we believe really drive high and consistently high levels of energy within a business. So we're going to go through these today again. I don't expect that you're able to nail every single one of these, but if you can get a good chunk of them right, and particularly the critical ones right, then you're putting yourself into a position to be driving really strong energy levels within your team. So first, rules of engagement. I love this. It is something that is omnipresent in every single team that I have ever led. It is all about what we will be known for as a team. And it governs not just how we behave externally, so how we respond to customers, when we respond to customers, how we turn up to customer meetings, how we address customers, how we conduct ourselves when we win and when we lose deals, but also through to internal communications. How do we handle all of that with our peers and with our friends and with the people that we work with to make sure that we're providing as much support internally as we are externally? I love the saying, if it's to be, it's up to me. And that often comes into rules of engagement around keeping our word and having respectful but challenging conversations. Second part behaviors that govern us. So it's a little bit like the rules of engagement I touched on respectful feedback but Open cand is a really good one. The party I've worked with textile industry, global business, heavily based out of the us they had a great saying and it went south. Something along the lines of for autonomy to work we must keep our commitments and honour our responsibilities. I love it for that business it was all about saying we will give you really high levels of autonomy, but for that to work we've got to do as we say we're going to do and do what we've committed to doing. Team efficiency big part of energy levels so how do we perform our roles without too much duplication, without too much time spent on non selling activities, Things like systems duplication, stuff that takes our time and effort away from selling. It's a real energy sapper and businesses that can get this right, that can reduce the amount of system duplication in particular will generally be able to keep energy levels higher. So today it really is all about being able to work in a mobile function. So being able to work from home, being able to work out on site and complete documentation at a customer's premises rather than needing to go back to the office or to the ranch and do it right. Really important to be able to make sure the team is operating efficiently. In terms of measurements, I think metrics are really important at keeping measurement levels up. Of course if you have a CRM dashboard that's got 12 reports on it and you go through them in depth, every single one to one or every single sales meeting, these can be detrimental to energy levels. But if you use them well, and particularly if you have a very focused number of metrics that you allow the team to measure themselves against that are very clear, they can actually be really empowering because you get to spend your time measuring, quickly measuring or efficiently measuring, but then you get to dive deep into the root cause rather than going through report after report. So spoiler alert. We do have a three box metric model. Yep, interesting name, really creative name, but we don't think the name's needed for this model. It really speaks for itself in terms of its simplicity. It's coming up in the next few podcasts and there'll be a free resource around it, but I'll keep you posted. Next along the lines keeping energy levels up all around lead generation KPIs, we need to have some strategies around how we self generate leads on top of how our marketing teams or our SDRs and appointment bookers make these leads. Sales people that can feed themselves never go hungry. So my experience, and certainly those within our business, is that if we can keep teams generating their own leads, energy levels are high. That's a whole topic on its own. I'm sure we'll cover it sometime this year, but I'll keep moving now onto a subset of lead generation is personal network growth. Right. There's generating leads as a salesperson, but there's also working on your own individual salesperson network. Right. So as an individual contributor, how can you grow your network through social media, through networking, through partners. Right. What's your secret source to building a personal network? I remember once having a team member. We were in a commercial B2B space, very much all about selling energy solutions. Actually, speaking of energy into commercial customers, he hated, absolutely hated lead generation and really struggled at it for a period of about 12 to 15 months. What we ended up working through, we went through about 15 different ways to grow your network. And we tried to find the way that resonated most with him. And for him, it was actually about referrals because he didn't want to be out cold calling, meeting new people. But he was really happy to go and talk to customers who had enjoyed his service previously. So he developed an extensive referral program and he really, really made sure he implemented it fastidiously. And really his lead generation numbers went from being very low across a team of about 20 through to in the top kind of 15% just by implementing that strategy. Right. So there are all types of personal network growth plans that don't necessarily involve cold calling. Moving on, lead response times. Really important that we have lead response times that allow us to get back to customers quickly. It keeps the energy up by knowing there's a sense of urgency. A large franchisee group, they had hundreds and hundreds of franchisees in their industry. They had a KPI when we were working with them of two hours. If you don't get back to a lead within two hours, it gets allocated onto the next franchisee. Tough, but created some great customer service results. Next part, how do we meet customers? Also really important in making sure that we have energy levels that are strong because we are all clear on what our prime method is to getting in touch with customers. Is it face to face? Is it via video link? Do we refer them to demonstrations or phone or email? And then an extension of this is how do we prepare for meetings? How do we prepare for meetings before we catch up with Customers. What profiling do we do? What's the minimum amount of information that we need? We want our salespeople to be well prepared before they're meeting customers. Certainly not scripted, but well prepared. So it's really important that we're clear what we need to achieve to be able to make sure our energy is focused in the right direction. Things like interstate and travel protocols important. We don't want people wasting time on working out when they can and can't travel. We want to be really clear that hey, customers over X Value travel and see them. Customers under X Value. You use your local colleagues in the area, for example. Right. Every business has different travel protocols next along the line. And this is a huge one for me. This is one of the most successful drivers of energy that I have seen in my time in Zayla and that is a process called deal reviews. So how do we go about ensuring that each of our BDMs can receive constructive feedback? Constructive feedback on the projects that they have in their pipeline in a really safe environment? For me, these meetings should happen weekly. They should have the whole team together and everyone contributes. Right. Roundtable, round the room. You're workshopping projects. You're talking about things that are going well, you're talking about things that you're struggling with and the team is giving you feedback as to how you can get out and close them. Super powerful when everyone engages. When do we abandon a sales process? Right. Great way to eat into energy levels is having a whole lot of customers that are just sitting in that dreaded bucket of inertia. That doom loop of I'm not sure, we're not ready yet. It's not a priority. We need to focus on something else. Right. That salespeople hate great businesses. I've seen in this area. They know how to get a fast yes or a fast no. They're okay with getting a no as long as it doesn't drag on. Now I'll asterisk this because there are industries that have long courtship processes and that's okay. You know who you are. Right. And you know how to make sure that your deals are managed well. But for the majority of industries, our lead cycles are going to be between one and six months and we need to make sure that we're not letting them drag out by getting a yes or a no. Okay. Accountability. Accountability and energy absolutely go hand in hand. This is not the kind of accountability where you are criticized specifically when something goes wrong, but it's a way of going about everything you do. We are accountable as A team, we will do as we say we're going to do. For me, the areas of accountability I'm talking about now are your non selling activities, the stuff that's a little bit more mundane and the stuff that we need to make sure as a team we've just got some key agreement as to how we go about our admin, how we go about updating our CRM system, how we submit our expenses right even to the point of when we do it. I've seen some really successful teams come together on a Friday before lunch, couple of hours on their admin, go and have lunch together and then they get back to work or even better, have lunch and then the afternoon together. They're doing their admin, right. They get it done in a group environment, makes it a little bit more fun and energy stays on. Post sale referral process. I spoke about that earlier with the example. But another great way to keep energy up is getting our team back out in front of customers. They know each generally a less offensive way to be out generating leads and one that's really powerful. Okay. One that's a little bit more challenging. It's actually about how do we challenge the status quo as a team to ensure that everyone keeps learning and our business offer keeps improving. It's critical that our salespeople have the confidence to be able to challenge the status quo, the confidence to be able to be heard, but the respect to understand that they won't always get their own way. So five years ago I was working with a medium sized business. Again, I think it was about a $50 million turnover. I think I've used this business before and there was a sales rep in that business that was incredibly challenging in terms of their feedback. And in the early days, their feedback really, really strong. They expected to get what they want and it became a bit disruptive. We managed to find a nice middle ground where this person segregated their feedback into certain times, into the most appropriate times, like sales meetings. And we worked through why not every piece of feedback could be implemented by the business. We actually did that by giving the person a bit more perspective across what the changes can mean. Whilst very challenging to manage, this person actually submitted significant amounts of ideas and I guess individual IP that allowed the business to grow and learn. So I was very grateful for it, albeit in a very difficult situation to manage. And to be frank, I've seen them around the world plenty of times. Really challenging to manage salespeople, but if they are channeled in the right way, with the right energy, super impactful to the business. Okay. Jumping on a little bit around, challenging the status quo. It's how do we have difficult conversations with each other? So we agree as a team, what is our preferred method of having a tough conversation, how do we do it? And ensuring that we're always asking permission before we have that conversation. Hi, James, I've got a couple of things to talk to you about now. Okay. We need to sit down and have a proper chat about it. James goes, yeah, great, let's do it. Or James goes, you know what, I've got this for proposal due in two hours. I've got to spend the time doing it and it's then up to me to say, let's reschedule. There's some important things to talk about, but let's do it at a time when your head's ready to go. The last thing we want to do is throw James off his sales pitch that he's making. But also we are unlikely to get the best of James if his mind is in other places. Okay. Very common prioritisation for salespeople. When and how do we prioritize? That's all about being really clear what our key tasks are and measuring them repeatedly. So when we have priorities, make sure they are coming up in our sales meetings, make sure they're coming up in our one to one meetings and make sure that we're actually measuring them effectively. If they're not a priority, don't measure them every single week. If they're not a priority, don't have communication that's going out about it every single week. Right. We just need to make sure that we are balancing priorities with the amount of communication that comes for that task or whatever the project is. Last but not least, really important for energy levels is that people feel safe when they come into the office, safe when they're working from home and safe when they're on site. We don't want people coming to work who don't feel safe because it will impact everything they do and more importantly, it will impact their family. So it's critical that as sales leaders, we make sure that everyone not only feels safe, but understands what safety looks like in the workplace. So if they find things that aren't right, they can call it out respectfully, they can call it out urgently if needed and get it corrected. Okay, so there's a bit in there. We've gone through quite a lot around the team step model, particularly E for energy and our word step. So whilst we don't expect every sales leader and every team that we work with to get that right. What we do see is some common traits in those who find energy to be consistently high on their team. First and foremost is these sales leaders often bring the energy themselves. And this is where the piece I often talk about around health and fitness, around personal health and fitness becomes really important. If you're fit, if you're healthy, if your mindset is strong, you turn up to work well. So all these little health and fitness tips that I give at the end of podcasts gives you a little bit more perspective as to why they're there. Deferring to others, right? So you might bring the energy yourself, but teams that can have multiple people bring efficiency or energy or focus into their teams really succeed, right? Because it's not all reliant on one person. So there are great techniques to be able to defer to others. Won't go through them today, but certainly when you have energy up across multiple people in the team, it's very powerful. Thirdly, setting the standards as a group life, everyone buys in how you're going to attend a sales meeting. And I've regularly had, when you like for meetings, you bring muffin up or you bring something healthy or you bring coffees, whatever it may be, right? That's not to punish people, that's more about having a bit of fun, having a bit of a laugh and having some respect for your colleagues. Last but not least, I love the same praise, specifically criticize. Generally, really important around energies in teams is that we make sure that when things go well, we praise the team and we're happy to praise individuals within reason. Right? We don't need to be creating or putting individuals up onto a pedestal. But even more important to that is the second half of that saying, which is criticised. Generally, the fastest way to bring energy down, to bring focus down, to bring commitment down in teams is when we individually pinpoint people. If something goes wrong, we play the ball, we don't play the man. Really super important, okay? So that's essentially the TeamSTEPPS playbook done. We've gone through how as a team, if we get our strategy, our talent and our energy levels right, we can expect to lead to peak performance. So once we get that peak performance, something that's really important is how we maintain it and we're really conscious of it here at stronger sales teams. So towards the end of Q3, this year, maybe into Q4, you'll see a platform that gets launched from us that has dozens and dozens and dozens of training sessions, some of which will have a specific Focus around energy. It'll take the legwork out of you needing to prepare those sessions yourselves. And there'll be heaps of publicity coming once it's ready to, but stay tuned. It'll definitely be announced on the podcast. All right, so there you have it. We've had a deep dive into what drives peak performance as a sales team, but as well what puts them in the best possible position for long term engagement and tenure and success. So what's your challenge from here? Get moving. Make it happen. Right? Take some small steps forward to implement the TeamSTEPPS playbook into your team. The free resource is now out. If you'd like a copy, DM me teamstep on any of the social media platforms or come directly through to me on our website www.strongersalesteams.com or email us. There's plenty of ways to find how you can get in touch with us. We'll get that TeamSTEPPS or the TeamSTEPPS playbook straight back out to you and you can start toying with it once you've had a go at it, you've engaged with your team. Feel free to contact me if you need more help. We run a free online call for new people to the business, so more than happy to focus specifically on that for you. Okay, before we leave that health and fitness tip, I mentioned it really specifically to give some perspective today. Today, a little bit unusual. It's all about smiling and the power of it when you're feeling down. Have you ever tried a forced smile? One of those smiles that for the first three or four seconds just hurts, right? It feels really awkward, but once you get there, you can hold for 10 or 15 seconds and you start to feel really good. I love it. I force a smile quite regularly when things don't go my way. Generally I'll do it by myself in private, but occasionally I'll force one in public and you tend to get better and better at it. But when you're really struggling, it's a small little micro hack that you can have to try a smile if you feel like it. Whatever you're doing now, try it. Just slowly turn that neutral face with that frown into a smile, hold it for three or four seconds and should start to get easier now, right? You should be able to hold that for about 15 seconds and if you're feeling good by the end of it, then it really has done wonders for you. Okay, something a little bit different, but I hope it works until our next podcast when we start to move out of our teamstep playbook and into some metric measurements and training programs and a whole lot of exciting things. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thanks everyone.

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