Drawing from several real-world success cases, this is the story of how to build a high-performance sales culture. Through grit, persistent focus, and the patience to make incremental changes, a company’s leadership can implement the strategies that produce positive transformation in any sales organization.
Begin with benchmarking
The path to high-performance sales starts when a firm’s leadership steps back and asks, “What does winning really look like?” To determine that, leadership must benchmark their company’s performance relative to its peer group. When they do this, firms frequently discover they’ve had low expectations for their salespeople. This is often due to the fact that leadership brings in a lot of new business, while the broader production force underperforms against relative benchmarks.
Here’s a not-entirely-hypothetical example: Let’s say that leadership calculates the firm’s average revenue per producer at $150,000 per, which is quite strong compared to their peer group. When the president and CEO’s numbers are removed, however, the average revenue per producer drops to $50,000, which is well below the benchmark. What can leadership do at that point? Rather than fire all their producers, the firm’s leadership can begin to reset expectations by using producer benchmarking reports to establish a well-defined target of where they want their sales team’s production to be. This introduces an important theme: Small steps can yield big results.
Take an objective look at current personnel
With the new goals in mind, leadership can make a meaningful assessment of the sales team and decide who they feel will be creating value in five years and who most likely will need to be managed out. Again, when done well, this is not an immediately transformative process – but it will turn out to be huge in the end. Although it might be tempting, leadership doesn’t need to overhaul the company’s compensation structure with the hope that the right people will leave. Instead, they can implement this change over time. Ongoing access to reliable benchmarking makes a patient, producer-cleanup phase possible.
Establish account thresholds and create compensation incentives
With benchmarked expectations firmly in place, leadership can institute simple, weekly sales meetings, focused on high-value opportunities in a deal drill format. At this point, it’s usually necessary to implement small business thresholds. The aim is not to completely discourage small accounts, but following the benchmarking and revenue reviews, leadership often recognizes that an overabundance of small business is creating capacity constraints, and sometimes the absence of thresholds is attracting producers who are more comfortable focusing on small accounts. In this case, a firm might set up a small business threshold at $5,000 in commercial lines. Once again, the goal is not to get rid of the accounts, but to make sure that the organization knows how and where it needs to level up. Relative to this, the firm can now begin to make gradual changes to its compensation structure, essentially adjusting a 50/50 new and renewal split down to a level that clearly incentivizes new business over renewal commission. The key is to do this very delicately, so that the firm can build a new culture rather than simply destroy the current one.
Grow within niches
As leaders set up a strategy and structure to move the business forward, they often make a key decision: become more niche focused. Here’s another not-so-hypothetical example: A firm that’s already generating revenue within real estate and private equity can start to build out those niches even more by hiring producers with the intention of placing them into those specific areas. The firm can then also make a focused effort to hire people from outside the industry who have a presence and aptitude within those niches.
Create a team-selling environment and provide the resources needed to succeed
As niche-building goals are being pursued by more specialized sales teams, the firm can layer in Salesforce to help with its deal drills and build transparency around its evolving sales culture. This works well when the CEO and president and a handful of other trusted leaders get fully behind team-selling efforts within the organization. Today, team-selling is deeply woven into the fabric of many of the most successful sales cultures. As a firm continues to grow, it will need to:
- Develop, or beef up, a built-out data analytics team.
- Fully commit to adopting specific niche resources where appropriate.
- Create a team of account executives to support sales professionals.
One of the ironies of building a high-performance sales team is that, when it starts to yield results, it becomes a challenge for producers to maintain service capability. Therefore, having client-facing personnel that don’t have sales responsibilities makes managing relationships much easier.
Name a head of sales who can spearhead AI and develop creative incentives
Often, leadership recognizes that as they continue to scale and significantly increase the number of high-performing producers, they need somebody to lead sales. As important as the current leadership is to the firm’s sales efforts, it’s difficult to grow at scale without a Chief Sales Officer (CSO) who can take over onboarding, training and leadership of the sales team. Generally, the firm’s CSO will guide producers in attracting, developing, and closing new business. They will also play a critical reporting function to make sure that the president and CEO are free to focus on making sales, not administering them.
Based on another not-so-hypothetical instance: Under the guidance of the CSO, the company can create a sales leadership institute to help with formal onboarding. The CSO can also take the lead on developing an AI strategy to maximize sales efforts.
At this point, some firms may roll out a sales incentive trip. For a producer to get attached to the trip, the producer might need to do $200,000 in new business. This can be a good way to attract talent and reward desired behaviors.
On the topic of attracting talent, with all of these changes in place, some firms have built such a strong reputation as an organization with a great sales culture – and successful producers! – that they’ve attracted accomplished producers from other firms who wanted to be part of the success.
Start small and let it snowball
Although these steps are all instructive, the key lesson, and the quality that most enables any firm to succeed, is patience. The company that is most successful at creating long-term change is the one that makes gradual increases to its average account sizes, not a huge transformation all at once. The successful firm gets producers focused on the right targets, and it sets up a structure for smaller accounts to be managed and serviced differently. In some cases, the firm may add administrative fees to smaller accounts to offset the concentration of resources those accounts require. By moving patiently, leadership can make the right decisions step by step. And based on that approach, rather than seeing new problems pile up, they see revenue snowball.
Once again, this is a “composite” case study. Every firm is different, and so the specific challenges are different. But building a high-performance sales culture always begins with real-world benchmarking, moves through an honest assessment of which personnel can shape the new direction, and proceeds with the patience needed to institute the types of incremental changes that gradually lock in long-term success.
