How do you diversify your sales team?

1 Assess your current situation

The first step to diversify your sales team is to assess your current situation and identify any gaps, biases, or barriers that may be affecting your hiring, retention, and promotion of diverse talent. You can use various tools and methods to collect and analyze data on your sales team's demographics, performance, engagement, and satisfaction. For example, you can conduct surveys, interviews, focus groups, or audits to gather feedback and insights from your sales staff and customers. You can also benchmark your data against industry standards, best practices, or your competitors to see how you compare and where you can improve.

2 Set clear and realistic goals

The second step to diversify your sales team is to set clear and realistic goals that align with your business objectives, values, and vision. Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), and should address both the quantity and quality of diversity in your sales team. For example, you can set goals such as increasing the representation of women, people of color, or LGBTQ+ in your sales team by a certain percentage or number within a certain timeframe, or improving the retention and engagement of diverse sales staff by a certain rate or score. You should also communicate your goals to your sales team and other stakeholders, and explain why they are important and how they will benefit everyone.

3 Implement effective strategies

The third step to diversify your sales team is to implement effective strategies that will help you attract, retain, and develop diverse talent in your sales team. Your strategies should be tailored to your specific goals, context, and challenges, and should involve multiple aspects of your sales organization, such as recruitment, training, mentoring, compensation, recognition, feedback, and culture. For example, you can implement strategies such as expanding your talent pool by reaching out to diverse networks, communities, or organizations, providing inclusive and unbiased hiring and assessment processes, offering flexible and supportive work arrangements, creating mentoring and sponsorship programs for diverse sales staff, providing equal and fair pay and incentives, celebrating and rewarding diversity and inclusion achievements, providing regular and constructive feedback, and fostering a culture of respect, belonging, and learning.

4 Monitor and evaluate your progress

The fourth step to diversify your sales team is to monitor and evaluate your progress and impact regularly and systematically. You should use the data and metrics that you collected in the first step to track and measure your performance against your goals, and to identify any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats that may arise along the way. You should also solicit and incorporate feedback and suggestions from your sales team and customers to improve your strategies and practices. You should celebrate and share your successes, as well as acknowledge and learn from your failures. You should also be flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances, needs, and expectations, and be ready to adjust your goals and strategies accordingly.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?