Team Growth Boils Down To These Four Traits

When hiring out a sales team, Acquirent looks to follow our five pillars for sales success. But sales success alone doesn’t make a team great. Greatness often comes from within – a series of traits that develop with excellent mentorship. Team growth comes through cultivation.

Every new sales rep at Acquirent is given our signature sales training as a means to cultivate talent. But each manager does things a little differently. In this video, Tim Timmerman shares what it takes to grow a sales person and a sales team. He boils success down to four attributes – respect, hunger, adaptability, and accountability. What does it take to grow a sales team?

Team Growth Through Respect

We all know the golden rule – treat others the way you expect to be treated. It’s pretty simple, but its something that people often look over. Whether it be team composition or dealing with clients, respect means the difference between a productive team and an unhappy one. It also makes a huge deal on calls themselves. We often write about the importance of Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, on sales calls. It plays a huge role in how we conduct ourselves over the phone, in understanding customer needs. It also means knowing how to handle rough calls, and being able to keep making more calls afterwards.

Naturally, respect is huge when it comes to sales. In an outsourced sales and marketing company like ours, it keeps us pushing forward and the energy high.

Team Growth Through Hunger

Hunger in sales refers to what makes you get on the phone and keep calling. It is the source of a salesperson’s drive or motivation – without it, a salesperson is as fruitless as a robocall. The desire to make deals can come from a variety of internal places. Some people are motivated by money, some by experience, and others by success. Identifying the source of that drive will allow you to achieve great things in sales.

As a manager, it can also be crucial to find what motivates your employees. Leveraging that hunger will increase your team productivity. Does your employee want to make strides in a certain direction? Actualize that. Are they money motivated? Coach them to maximize their commission. Employees are only as good as their leadership, and feeding their hunger will let them blossom.

Team Growth Through Adaptability

A good salesperson is quick on their feet. They know how to roll with the punches. They also know how to take advice and implement it in their sales process. Can an employee take constructive criticism from a manager and use it to close more deals? If the answer is no, maybe sales isn’t the game for them.

The ability to learn means being able to observe your own behavior and integrate new behaviors into it. Every salesperson has strengths and weaknesses. I might be extremely personable over the phone, but if I can’t close a sale, I’m never going to be successful in sales. A good manager can recognize these traits and provide feedback that their salespeople can understand. Knowing how to bring out the best in an employee will allow them to thrive. It will increase retention, motivation, and success.

Growth and Accountability

We are all accountable to authorities. It can be our family, our laws, or our religious beliefs. In sales, we must be accountable for our company, our clients, and the people we are calling. However, most important is our accountability to ourselves. Being able to manage one’s own behaviors means that they will have a greater outlook for success, both in their job and in the long term. The best employees are those that are able to develop their own schedules, learn from their weaknesses, and grow for the sake of growing.

All of these traits fall under the umbrella of accountability. The ideal salesperson already knows that they should aim for these traits, but accountability can be taught and cultivated. The importance of a good manager comes through directing these energies in a meaningful way. How can you, as a manager, bring out the best in your employees?

The Importance of Emotional Intelligence</strong?

Although companies have begun stressing the importance of emotional intelligence, it is something that is difficult to quantify. Unlike IQ, a persons relationship to others isn’t necessarily quantifiable in terms of a budget or other metrics. It is something innate and intangible. While it might not immediately correlate to things like revenue, Acquirent stresses the importance of team structure because we know it makes our employees better for it. People come here happy to work, and eager to grow. Any sales job comes with stresses inherent to the position. Creating an environment that is great in spite of this makes a team better for it.