How to Spread Sales Success among Your Team

One of the best – and most obvious – ways to boost sales performance is to ask your top sellers to share their best practices with the whole team.

Unfortunately, many sales managers hesitate to do this, thanks to three fatal elements:

1. They believe top sellers will be reluctant to share their winning ways.
2. They don’t want to ask their top performers to step away from the field and lose out on time that could otherwise be spent selling.
3. They lack virtual sales enablement tools that would help give reps mission-critical insights.

There’s some truth in the first two assumptions listed above – but there are also ways around them. Here’s some of our best sales management wisdom for getting your best reps to share their knowledge.

Assumption 1: Top sellers don’t want to share their winning secrets.

If this statement accurately reflects the feelings of your top sellers, you’re due for a sales culture makeover. Why? For one thing, any intelligence or information that can help your sales organization close more deals has no business being kept secret.

In fact, the infamous “lone wolf” mentality is becoming extinct in favor of team selling. Chalk it up to a massive shift in buyer expectations. Customers today want you to connect with them on their terms. And thanks to information readily available online and on social networks (such as company mergers, industry news, job changes, and even personal insights that can open the door to building rapport), prospective buyers expect sellers to know what their needs are before the sales cycle starts.

That adds up to a lot of pressure on sales reps to display a high level of business acumen. Sales teams that leverage their own collective intelligence make it easier to cultivate a competitive edge in the market. For enterprise organizations, especially, it’s imperative that sales reps be able to use collaboration tools within CRM systems to tap collective intelligence and customer insights to create a seamless end-to-end customer experience.

Another soul-searching sales management question to ask yourself: what behaviors does your compensation plan reward? A little healthy competition among the team can be great, but if you’ve set up a gladiator-style incentives program that pits rep against rep, you’re not doing the team any favors. In fact, you could be standing in the way of creating a dynamic and collaborative team that works together to achieve top results companywide.

Assumption 2: Top sellers don’t have time to share their best practices.

Although it’s usually very helpful for new hires or struggling reps to get some hands-on help from superstars, it unfortunately doesn’t do much for the rep who’s doing the teaching.

Ultimately, you want to free your top performers up to get in front of as many customers as possible. Even so, top performers do not achieve success because they’re constantly selling. Top performance is the result of a variety of strategic activities that sometimes don’t involve actual customer face-time. A recent SEC study, for example, showed that top selling sales reps invest 15 percent more time than their peers on pre-call planning with sales managers.

A simple and cost-conscious way to work around this dilemma: create a virtual sales resource center where tips and best practices are available on demand. According to Michael Nelson, vice president of sales at ON24, a sales resource center is a highly effective way to spread knowledge.

“This has been one of the most effective and cheap ways to get our reps up-to-speed on new product knowledge,” says Nelson, who adds that ON24 keeps between 40 and 50 sales-training videos on file for just about every new product rollout or topic a sales rep would find useful, all recorded by its best and most talented salespeople.

Don’t let misapprehensions about sharing knowledge prevent you from creating the strongest sales team possible. Start using these sales management tips today to help your top sellers spread their success.