Tag: company culture

Build a Collaborative Sales Culture By Encouraging Teamwork and Knowledge Sharing

Posted on by Nick Mann

It may sound cliche and a little cheesy, but the saying “success is a team sport” applies to sales 100%. If your salespeople exist in a silo with little to no collaboration, it’s hard to succeed, let alone reach the top of your industry.

But don’t take my word for it. For this article, I’ll share some concrete data that quantifies just how big of an impact building a collaborative sales culture can have and proven strategies for making your team more collaborative.

Need to Know Stats

To put things into perspective, I’ve compiled several illuminating stats that show why having a collaborative sales culture is so important.

First, it’s been found to increase customer satisfaction ratings by 41%. Next, it improves product quality by 34% and product development by 30%.

And the stat you’re probably most interested in is that it increases sales by 27%.

Here’s a graph to help visualize this data.

If you’re looking to check all the most critical boxes for getting ahead in business, strong collaboration is just the ticket. It helps improve the customer experience, enhance product quality, and boost sales for a win-win-win.

Conversely, “A recent survey revealed that 85% of employees believe that poor communication is the primary reason for project failures. When sales teams struggle with collaboration, sales performance takes a hit. In fact, teams that experience high levels of miscommunication can see a decrease of up to 20% in their overall sales performance.”

The question now is, what exactly can you do to make your sales team more collaborative?

Like any other area of sales or business, my philosophy is to keep it simple and practical, focusing on the most critical areas. This brings us to our next section.

Teamwork and Knowledge Sharing: The 2 Pillars of Building a Collaborative Sales Culture

Let me start by saying that there are a ton of factors that can contribute to building a more collaborative sales culture. Here are eight that apply across the board.

While it’s nice to incorporate all of these elements, I find that it’s best to concentrate on two in particular when shifting momentum initially. As you improve, you can always work on these other areas later on. But at first, you need to zero in on what will get the biggest overall results.

From my experience, teamwork and knowledge sharing are “the big two” that should get the ball rolling when sparking sales culture transformation.

Encouraging Teamwork

Typically, the best way to get started is to build a framework that promotes cross-functional collaboration between different departments, such as marketing and customer support. Because company departments don’t exist independently and depend on each other greatly, it’s important to create a system where there’s heavy communication between all departments.

A simple example would be using a robust CRM platform where all departments have a 360-degree overview of each customer. Marketing would input the initial customer profile, which your sales and customer support team could easily reference. And whenever changes are made, updates should be made in real time.

Another good way to improve teamwork is to have a policy where open communication is welcome, as long as it’s constructive. When your sales team knows they have a safe space to voice their opinion, this naturally creates a more collaborative environment where individuals can share ideas and work on correcting problems so they don’t have a chance to fester.

And something you can do as a sales manager is to lead by example by doing the following:

  • Be quick to communicate and collaborate with all team members
  • Praise salespeople who are committed to teamwork
  • Celebrate successes by congratulating salespeople (if they’re comfortable with that)

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a great resource for more innovative ways to improve sales teamwork.

Encouraging Knowledge Sharing

The second part of the equation is getting serious about knowledge sharing. When information is siloed, it hurts everyone.

For instance, if your marketing team doesn’t provide your sales reps with enough information, it makes it harder to prioritize leads and make conversions. If your sales team doesn’t provide customer support with enough information, it makes it more difficult to retain customers. And if your sales team doesn’t keep the information flowing with one another, there could be clunky handoffs and your customer may not get the optimal product.

So how can you remedy this?

You can make a lot of progress by simply leveraging the right tools in your tech stack. Start with the basics like having your sales team use a collaboration tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams. That way, everyone can stay up-to-date on what’s happening in real time without skipping a beat.

When it comes to knowledge sharing between marketing and sales, a lead scoring tool can be invaluable, as it quantifies how hot a lead is so your salespeople can prioritize their efforts. For example, Pipedrive provides a simple system that lets marketing hand off leads to sales and lets them know who’s primed to buy and who needs more nurturing.

Finally, I suggest creating a centralized resource where everyone can instantly find essential information like:

  • Your sales playbook
  • A list of customer personas
  • The UVP and key features of different products
  • Customer testimonials
  • Case studies

This should keep everyone on the same page and should accelerate the ramp time of new sales reps.

Infusing Collaboration Into Your Sales Culture

To recap, collaboration contributes to optimizing the three most crucial areas of your business —customer experience, product quality, and conversions. The numbers don’t lie.

While a lot goes into building a more collaborative sales culture, zeroing in on teamwork and knowledge sharing should help you make big gains the quickest. From there, you can make iterations until you’re firing on all cylinders.

Ready to take your sales hiring to a new level and eliminate weaknesses while increasing screening accuracy? Take the HireDNA Hiring Readiness Assessment today.

Evaluating Cultural Fit in SaaS Sales Recruiting: Beyond the Resume

Posted on by Nick Mann

Skillset, industry experience, a proven track record, communication. These are some of the main factors SaaS sales recruiters look at when assessing candidates. And they’re all incredibly important. But there’s another vital factor that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves — cultural fit.

What is Cultural Fit?

This refers to how well a SaaS sales candidate fits in with your team from a cultural standpoint and can include sharing the same goals, values, attitudes, and working style. When someone is a good cultural fit it increases the chances of them meshing well with your existing team for better collaboration and overall harmony within your organization.

Conversely, if someone isn’t a good cultural fit it’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. If their goals, values, attitudes, etc., don’t align with the rest of your teams, there’s almost guaranteed to be friction right from the start.

Here are a few stats that shed light on the importance of cultural fit.

While choosing someone who’s a good cultural fit doesn’t guarantee success, it’s extremely important for retention and profitability. In fact, “The result of poor culture fit due to turnover can cost an organization between 50-60% of the person’s annual salary,” Forbes reports. When this happens at scale it can quickly erode your overall foundation.

With that said, here’s a straightforward way to evaluate cultural fit in SaaS sales recruiting to drastically increase your odds of making the right hire.

Write a Job Description That Reflects Your Company’s Culture

Technically, the first step is to define your company culture. But assuming you already know that, the first thing to do is ensure any job description you write clearly reflects what you’re looking for in a salesperson in terms of culture.

For instance, you may want to mention what your specific values are, what your day-to-day work environment is like, and what’s important for being successful in a role. Here’s a real-life example from Google where they mention their ideal salespeople have experience working and learning in a fast-moving, dynamic environment and have a passion for using Google products.

Making it clear what your culture is from the start should reduce the number of poor-fitting candidates who apply and save you time when narrowing down your candidate pool.

Create Cultural Fit Interview Questions

Perhaps the most crucial step in the process is asking SaaS sales candidates the right questions that specifically target cultural fit. Generally, this should consist of around five or so questions that allow you to gauge this with a reasonable amount of objectivity.

Here are some examples of basic questions to ask:

  • What’s your ideal working environment?
  • What are your core goals and values?
  • What’s your preferred management style?
  • Do you work better independently or as part of a team?
  • What motivates you to make sales?
  • What do you feel you need to succeed in a SaaS sales position?

And here’s a more detailed list that focuses on behaviors, attitudes, values, beliefs, and assumptions.

To ensure consistency, you’ll want to ask the same questions to every candidate you interview.

Compare a Candidate’s Answers with Your Culture

With each response, pay close attention to how well it fits in with your company’s culture. For instance, if being able to work well collaboratively as part of a group is critical to succeeding in your SaaS sales role, you would likely want a candidate who works better as part of a team rather than independently.

Or if some of your core values are passion, teamwork, and continual improvement, you would want a candidate’s responses to be similar. Just be sure that whoever handles recruiting understands what you’re looking for and listens for cues during their interactions.

Pay Attention to Personality and Character

Another part of the process is a bit trickier to analyze and isn’t something that can be done quantitatively. But paying attention to personality and character during interactions, from initial outreach, to interview scheduling, to the interview itself, is a great opportunity to assess cultural fit as well.

For example, during the first few moments when you’re meeting with a candidate and having a casual conversation, use it to get a feel for what their natural demeanor is like and if they seem like someone who would get along with your existing team.

Are they polite and courteous? Do they conduct themselves professionally? Are they a smooth conversationalist?

These are just a few things to consider during casual conversation and can add to the rest of the input you get from previous steps to determine overall cultural fit.

Be Careful of Bias

One last thing to note is that you should always be aware of the potential for bias and not let that cloud your judgment. While it’s impossible to eliminate bias 100%, it’s something that can be largely reduced by simply being aware of it.

Also, it’s helpful to get feedback from multiple team members when making the final hiring decision. I find that this tends to provide a clearer perspective on how good of a cultural fit a candidate is, and you’re less likely to fall into the bias trap when you get the opinions of multiple people.

Let’s Recap

One area of SaaS sales recruiting that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves is cultural fit. While it may not be quite as important as skillset and experience, it plays a significant role in how likely someone is to mesh with your team. To avoid premature turnover and other complications, it’s worthwhile to make assessing cultural fit part of your hiring process.

That way, whoever you hire should truly check all the boxes, and it greatly increases the odds of things working out for both parties.

If you’re looking to make your SaaS sales recruiting more accurate and predictive to find the best of the best talent, check out the Objective Management Group sales assessment. It can be fully customized to your unique selling environment, and 92% of candidates recommended by it go on to reach the top half of the sales force.

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The Surefire Way to Create an Elite SaaS Sales Culture

Posted on by Nick Mann

Let’s be honest. The word “culture” has basically become a buzzword and, in many ways, is now diluted. But despite its slightly annoying ubiquity, having a strong SaaS sales culture is nevertheless highly important.

Why? Because it helps attract better reps, reduces turnover, increases synergy, and generally makes your company a better place to work. In turn, this makes your business more competitive, more profitable, and sets the stage for long-term growth.

While numerous factors contribute to an elite SaaS sales culture, here’s what you should focus on above all else.

Use a SaaS Sales Recruiting Platform to Find Top Talent

In my opinion, the first step of building a great culture starts from the top by not just finding next-level talent but finding next-level talent that’s compatible with your company. These days, a one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t cut it, and you only want to recruit candidates that check all the right boxes. This means choosing candidates based on obvious factors like knowledge, experience, and selling abilities, as well as more subtle factors like thriving in your unique selling environment and being a great cultural fit.

If you can do this effectively, you should make significantly fewer bad hires and lower turnover, which will naturally strengthen your culture.

A proven way to find top talent is by using a SaaS sales recruiting platform like HireDNA. It takes a scientific, data-driven approach where you first create an ideal candidate profile.

Based on this information, HireDNA sources top talent via a national network of active and passive candidates.

From there, candidates are screened…

…and the best ones are then given a sales skills assessment.

Then it’s just a matter of making your choice while having quantifiable data at your fingertips.

SaaS companies that use HireDNA are able to eliminate 96% of wrong hires and lower turnover by a staggering 50%. You can learn more about HireDNA’s recruiting process here.

Build a Framework That Promotes Collaboration and Communication

One of the quickest ways for a culture to turn toxic is to have reps silo information and “go rogue” where each person works individually instead of as a team. While independence is fine and should be encouraged to some extent, it’s important to create an environment where there’s strong collaboration and communication. And this won’t necessarily happen on its own.

As a leader, you’ll want to intentionally build a framework that facilitates this type of teamwork. A good example would be using Slack to create a centralized digital space where your reps can interact, share information, offer tips, and so on.

Besides that, it eliminates much of the back-and-forthing that comes from using email and is perfect for building rapport.

Encourage Friendly Competition

Another critical component of establishing a winning SaaS sales culture is creating an environment that’s conducive to friendly competition. Notice the key word here is “friendly” — not cutthroat where reps try to steal each other’s leads and outdo each other to the point that it becomes toxic.

Ideally, there will be an atmosphere where your sales team gets along and “has each other’s backs” but also has a healthy competitive spirit where everyone consistently does their best. But how do you achieve that?

Here are some ideas:

  • Offer incentives for top performers
  • Hold contests
  • Encourage reps to keep reaching new personal bests and beat their old records
  • Give kudos for achievements

Let Reps Be Themselves

Each salesperson has their own unique strengths and brings something of distinct value to the table. The last thing you want to do as a leader is to suppress that and try to put them into a box. Rather, you want to let each rep tap into their specific skillset and personality so they can fully leverage it and extract their full potential.

This, admittedly, is often easier said than done, and you want to obviously have some type of structure in place rather than letting reps “run wild.” But there are two specific things you can do that will help reps be themselves.

One is to avoid micromanaging and take a step back if you find yourself “hovering.” I think this quote from The Harvard Business Review sums it up perfectly. “Recognize that your way is not the only way, or even necessarily, the best way.” Adopting this mindset should help you avoid this common issue among many leaders.

The other strategy is to give your salespeople more freedom, which can include:

  • Letting them work from where they’re the most productive (e.g. home vs. in the office)
  • Giving them some wiggle room during sales presentations rather than following a detailed script
  • Offer support without telling them what to do

Promote Ongoing Learning

The final piece of the puzzle of building an amazing culture is making learning a habit. Here’s what Forbes has to say about it.

“One characteristic that routinely sets top-performing reps apart is their habit of always staying open to ongoing training, coaching, and development. When we surveyed more than 150 senior sales leaders, top performers earned an average score of 7.5 in this category versus 5.9 for the rest of the reps.”

Whether it’s giving them free access to innovative sales courses and lectures, having them participate in sales programs, or simply sending a team-wide email featuring an interesting YouTube video to help hone their craft, creating this type of atmosphere can do wonders for your culture.

Setting Your Team Up for Success

Given that SaaS sales culture trickles down into virtually every other area of your business, it’s something that demands top priority. While finding success will look a little different for each company, the strategies listed here address the key areas you’ll need to create the perfect environment.

And if you’d like to learn more about HireDNA and see it in action, be sure to schedule your free demo today.