What are some of the keys to a successful sales culture?
First, it's leadership, like Al Davis the legendary owner of the Oakland Raiders said "just win baby" well let's take it one step further and say "just leadership baby." Without leadership you will not succeed in creating a successful sales culture. There are tons of positive thinking speakers touting their idea that "positive thinking is everything." Positive thinking is not everything, if it was your credit union could have a successful sales culture with just -- positive thinking. Positive thinking is Baloney, Boulderdash, hogwash when compared to leadership. If someone said to me you can choose either positive thinking or leadership, which would you pick? I would select leadership every day, hands down. However, we all know that positive thinking alone is not going to work. Is positive thinking important sure it is, I love to be a positive guy. However, what really works is leadership. What really drives a process is leadership. You as a leader have got to make the sales culture work, if you don't make it work it won't work. Period, end of discussion, end of sentence. Leadership makes it happen, and every thing else in the distant third. Yes, you heard me right its third, nothing plays second fiddle to leadership. You have never seen a world championship team in any sport win without a great coach who unified the team. You have never seen a national champion without leadership and great coaching. Success never happens by mistake. Success leaves clues. Leadership is one of those major clues.
Second, it's buy-in. If everyone in your organization does not buy in you will not create a successful sales culture. Trust me on this one. I have seen one employee blow up the entire sales culture process by moaning, complaining, and whining at the water cooler. Yes one employee blew up the entire process, yes, they stopped it dead in its tracks. My question to you is this, are you going to let one employee destroy your plans for success? Yes or No? If you let one negative employee be a better salesperson than you are, then you deserve to lose. Is that one employee a better salesperson about their negative culture than you are at selling a positive sales culture. Trust me, every employee in your shop sells one of three things, two out of the three are bad. They can sell the negativity. They can sell apathy, which is the best friend of negativity. Or they can be a cheerleader for the sales culture. And you get to pick which of those three they sell. But everyone in the organization will pick one of those three. Watch very carefully to see who is doing what.
Third, it's training and practice. Once everyone is all in the same hymnal and the same page then train, train, train and train some more. Employees need to learn these new skills, and practice, practice, practice, practice their new skills. You can do this in a variety of ways. You can hire an outside expert. You can create the sales training internally. You can have credit union hero’s, stories and demos. You have a credit union hero’s tell their successful sales training stories. The hero tells their stories of success and this demonstrates successful practices to the rest of your winning team. Every great coach says they need a leader in the club house, hero’s, stories and demo’s get your leaders to stand up in the club house. I call this hero’s, stories and demos. If you are not doing this practice, get it started. You can also open an hour later one day per week to let your leaders get in front of the group to share their hero stories. You can use this time to create a sales culture one hour at a time one week at a time. You do not change behavior with only one meeting and one memo. Please for the love of all things good do not believe you are going to change things with just one memo and one meeting. You change a culture by constancy of purpose and focusing on what you want to accomplish and achieve by repeating it over, and over and over again.
Fourth, everything else is just window dressing. A successful sales culture requires leadership, buy-in, and training. If you install and use those three things successfully you will begin to see positive things happening in your credit union. If you do those things consistently and constantly you will in fact be the leader your employees are looking to follow. Employees know it is a competitive world, and if they don’t take their share of the pie they may go without desert. They know this, they want you to demonstrate with your actions that you know this too. And if you are a sales leader at your credit union it will become a sales credit union. Remember leadership is everything, and everything else is a distant third. “Just Leadership Baby!”