"Sales Teams and Psychological Safety"... this is what I'm learning...

I spent most of my career selling. I've been through every sales training you can imagine, from SPIN to Challenger, Solution Sales to Inbound... with all sorts of models and techniques in between.

All of them are aimed at improving my own sales ability.

Not one of them was about being how to be effective as part of a sales team.

This profession is traditionally designed to make colleagues compete with one another. You each have an individual quota, you have your own customers, you have your own KPI's and you are probably performance managed based on how you compare to your immediate team mates.

It is not a great environment to promote collaborative work!!!

BUT, I think it is in the interests of every seller and every sales team to get much better at this, and fast.

This is my take on why:

1. Every sales department seems to be adapting their model... whether it's from transactional sales to consultative, or from short term orders to long term partnerships with their customers. In the technology world especially, this seems to be a constant theme. The business that sellers work for is probably trying to professionalise or mature their sales model in some way.
2. There is a recognition within those businesses, and the sellers we've worked with, that to be more effective they need to learn some new skills. The most common two that we see are: successfully leading a virtual team and building relationships with more senior customer stakeholders.
3. Customers are behaving differently. Again, in the tech world, customers are more informed than before, the choices are more varied (and complex) and the "noise" they are subjected to as buyers and decision makers is significant. The tech industry is changing so quickly that what customers have valued from suppliers previously seems to be subtly changing.

Given all, of the above, two things I believe are true:

• What has previously made a sales person effective in the past might not make them successful in the future
• There are new skills for sellers to learn, and they need to do it quickly.

So if you are a Sales Leader reading this and you've got this far, you might be saying one of two things... "So what?" or "Are you trying to sell me training?". (there might be other things but this is a family show....).

This is the "So What", and it's not training...

The FASTEST way for your team to learn how to adapt their sales approach, to learn how to successfully lead a virtual team, to build more senior relationships in their customers, to become more consultative, to forge longer term partnerships etc.. etc... is to learn from each other AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

Given all of the points I made earlier about the typical sales environment, you need to be very intentional about making this learning possible, and that's where Psychological Safety comes in (if you aren't familiar with what Psychological Safety is then this is a good video to get you started).

So how do you create a Psychologically Safe Sales Team?

1. Frame the work. I wouldn't necessarily even introduce the terminology as "Psychological Safety" doesn't scream "This is going to help me hit quota". Your framing to the team needs to be something that invokes curiosity and willingness to engage with it. "We are going to spend time together intentionally learning how to solve challenges and develop skills to hit our targets" as an example (not a great one, but an example nonetheless).
2. Bring people together without an agenda. Most team meetings are rammed full of presentations and decks, with most people valuing the time spent together in between. Flip it. Survey your team in advance and ask them what the 2/3 things are that they would most like to learn from one another, or the things they feel they need to learn how to do in order to be successful this/next financial year.
3. Sit back and facilitate. As a leader, your role in this context is not to know the answers or solve the problems! You need to enable people to learn from one another. Engage, prompt, ask questions, be curious but hold back on suggesting answers. The natural instinct from most leaders is to try and solve for their team. In this scenario you need to let them work these things out and then tell you what they need from you to make it happen.
4. Experiment. When we've done this with sales teams we've seen LOADS of great ideas created by sales people (I've listed some of my favourites below ??). The key thing a leader can do with this energy and enthusiasm is not apply pressure to it with expectation that it has to succeed in iteration 1... but you have to balance that with holding the team accountable for trying it. Framing it as an "experiment" seems to work well to achieve this.

If you want to learn more or ask me some questions on this then you can join my webinar that I'm running on this very topic on FIRDAY 7TH MARCH at 12.30-13.00! Just email me on [email protected] if you want the link.

What ideas have sales teams come up with?

Here are my top 5:

1. Agree the top 3 things you want to learn from a customer win that would ACTUALLY be useful (instead of the normal humble brag....)
2. Team QBR Days which includes a focus on the new activities/ideas sellers are trying, and what they're learning
3. "Slay of the Day" (this is the moment I learned exactly how to use "Slay"). Taking time to celebrate and share something that worked.
4. Group Learning. Every sales team has mandatory sales, perhaps get together to go through ones that are particularly important/technical to talk and debate as a group.
5. "Bring out the Dead". Seller shares a customer account that isn't spending and the group debate, discuss and create ideas on how to tackle it.

Thanks for reading, I would love to know what you think!