“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” - Peter Drucker  

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You've likely heard this saying before. Culture is paramount when building a team, especially a sales team. Being intentional about the culture you build is crucial. A great culture makes success more likely, while a poor one makes an already challenging road nearly impossible to navigate. So, are you being intentional about your culture, or are you letting it develop organically, as if by accident?

Be intentional and deliberate. This is within your ability, and your team will thank you for it.

Have you been a part of a success culture?

First, think about the best teams you've been a part of in your life. What made them great? What made them not so great?
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You will find that most successful teams have a few key things in common. Accountability. Transparency. Clear goals and plan to achieve them. (Check out this presentation on creating and leading accountable teams from Eric Coryell.)

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Perhaps your team's culture has started to take form in the wrong direction. That’s OK, it’s never to late to shift your team’s culture in the right direction. Start now. Start with this essay. Start by putting in writing, in black and white, the things that you aspire to be true about your culture.

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Begin with your purpose. Why are you here? Why is your company in business? Consider the mission, vision, and values of your business as you build your culture. Don't just think about them – write them down. Cultures evolve as companies evolve, and you will revisit this exercise as you scale your team. So, embrace the discomfort in the process, as that's where growth comes from.

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What is a Sales Success Culture anyway?

It may sound cliché, but defining success is essential. Don't assume everyone on your team wants the same success. Each person has a unique definition, and you cannot presume they are all willing to do what's required to achieve their personal success. That's why it's vital to clarify what success means and to reinforce your success culture continuously.

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Success is subjective and individual. The team's success is the sum of each team member's accomplishments. As leaders, it's our responsibility to guide those we lead towards their individual successes.

Conduct a goal-setting exercise with your team. Encourage them to define what success looks like for them personally, professionally, and financially:

• What is success 25 years out?
• What about 10 years out?
• What is a milestone 1 year out that will show progress toward your 10 or 25 year goals?
• What is something that you will start, stop, or keep doing in the next 90 days that will help you hit your 1 year milestone? ‍

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Repeat this exercise quarterly with your team, yourself, and even your spouse or partner. Goal setting has a direct correlation with success in my experience. Make this part of your habits, make it part of your culture.

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Make success the cornerstone of your culture

Once you've defined your goals, incorporate them into your team's language. When your team meets, writes, or talks, ensure your success culture is reflected in these interactions.

You will start to see your team mention aspects of your success culture in their Slack messages and conversations. They will talk about their goals, they will celebrate others’ successes, they will be on the hunt for bright spots. That’s when you know it is working.

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Establish an operating rhythm for your team, as it serves as the foundation of a sales success culture. Think of it as your organization's drumbeat, providing a cadence for working towards your goals. While there's no perfect structure, consistency is key. Consider implementing a daily standup, weekly one-on-ones, weekly forecast meetings, and weekly sales team meetings as part of your rhythm.

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Here's a simple operating rhythm template for your revenue team:

Daily Standup - 15 minutes or less

• Use this meeting to kick off the day, it can be as short as 5 minutes. It’s ceremonial, it let’s the reps know “we are now checking into work”. It’s the ding of the bell that starts the next round of the boxing match that is sales.
• Get everyone talking, this is the most important thing. Get them using their brains and their mouths. Rev up the motor for a day of sales ahead
• It’s great to celebrate successes from the previous day (or week, if the standup is on a Monday). Deals closed, demos set, etc.
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Weekly 1:1 with each direct report - 30-45 minutes

• It’s critical that each person on the team gets a weekly 1:1 with their manager. Use this meeting to make sure that the person is on track for their personal, professional, and financial goals.
• The structure for a 1:1 is the same every time: what’s going well, what’s not going well, what is the most important thing for us to talk about

• The above structure is run by the person receiving the 1:1. It’s their meeting to run.
• Every five to six 1:1s you can zoom out and talk specifically about goals and how the individual is progressing toward those goals.
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Weekly Forecast meeting - 60 minutes

• Most early-stage sales teams don’t have a rhythm for forecasting. It’s a tough skill to develop and it starts with creating space in the calendar that is focused on forecasting performance.
• Pull up your CRM on the screen during the meeting so that you can look at individual opportunities as reps or managers talk about them
• Create a forecast spreadsheet where each individual reports their forecast monthly
• Forecasting meetings are NOT a deal review meeting. The forecast meeting should not be used to troubleshoot issues or to address problems in the business.
• The sole purpose of the forecast meeting for each person to report on their commit and best case forecasts for the period
• The commit forecast is the number that the individual is 90% certain they will hit. These deals always have a confirmed champion, a clear next step, and a time-based incentive
• The best case forecast are deals that are 50% likely to come in but require support from the executive team to get the deal over the line (for example, an executive intro or pricing adjustment)
• Sales operations and sales enablement should be involved in this meet, but they are auditing the meeting rather than participating. They are there to receive information about team performance and they should be looking out for opportunities to support the team. Eventually, sales operations will run the meeting completely.
• The sales leader should be listening for deals and opportunities where the playbook is not being run.
• Forecasts are not probabilistic. They are the sum of each deal that is likely to come in. The rep and manager should know their business well enough to speak to each opportunity in the pipeline.
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Weekly Sales Team meeting - 30 minutes or less

• Each week, bring the team together for a short meeting to update on progress and to celebrate bright spots.
• The sales leader (or CEO if that’s the sales leader) should kick off the meeting with a short reminder of the purpose of the business, the tenants of the sales culture (to deliver personal, professional, and financial success), and the progress toward team goals for the period
• Alternate speakers such that each section is presented by a different person. Presenter fatigue is a real thing
• Celebrate everyone who is pacing toward 100% or more of their monthly or quarterly quota. Celebrate key wins or customers that have come in since the last meeting.
• Provide updates from product, marketing, or elsewhere in the business that reps need to know about.
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** The first weekly sales meeting of the month is a great chance to kickoff the month. Because the first week of the month is light on bookings and progress for that month, it’s a great opportunity to talk about the successes and bright spots from the previous month. You can use this meeting to update the team on progress year to date and set forward the goals for the month ahead. ALWAYS CELEBRATE YOUR QUOTA HITTERS.

For those of you who feel like this is too many meetings, think again. This is at most 2.5 hours of your team’s time each week. That’s 2.5 hours out of a 40 hour week. That’s only 6% of your time to make sure that you team is marching to the same drumbeat. It’s worth your time to get this right.
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‍Get in the habit of celebrating bright spots

If you want flowers to grow, water them.

Authors Chip and Dan Heath discuss finding the bright spots in the business and celebrating them. What you celebrate will get attention and it will be repeated. Make finding bright spots a part of your culture. Catch people doing the right thing (instead of catching people doing the wrong thing) and make it public.

Your best performers want to hear they are doing a good job. They want to be celebrated, even the best ones need praise. In NBA legend Bill Russell’s memoir Go Up For Glory, he reflects on a moment in his younger days when a coach was hard to give praise:

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“Anyone wants to be told they are doing a good job. Anyone wants the support of his coach and this is a lesson coaches should learn in any sport and at any level. It never hurts to say a good word for your player.”

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Don’t make the mistake of giving too much tough love, even if you feel like the team doesn’t need the praise. Find a reason to give praise where it is deserved. Be genuine. The team will follow your lead.

If your struggling with where to start, here are a few tactical ways to celebrate bright spots:

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Celebrate each win publicly in real time

Connect your CRM to slack (you can use Zapier for this) and automatically post new customers or bookings into the channel. Give everyone access to this channel, and create a habit of celebrating every win. This channel will become infectious for you and your team. You can even make a channel for opps created or demos booked for your SDR team. You can make a channel for every 5 star review you get on G2 crowd or TrustPilot to recognize your support team. You can also make a channel for each go live or renewal to recognize your customer success team. Find the wins wherever they are.

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Weekly Team Meetings

In your weekly team meeting, celebrate your top performers and anyone who is pacing to 100% of quota for the period. Put their picture and their progress toward the revenue plan. If it’s a zoom meeting, get everyone to come off of mute and celebrate their colleagues.

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Monthly Stack Rank Email

At the beginning of each month, send out an email to the entire sales team and the executive team that includes the following content:

• Thank each person on the team for contributing to the group’s success. Don’t forget to recognize your partners across the company! (CS, Legal, product, etc.)

• Update on the total bookings for the month, show progress toward the quarterly goal
• Recognize each individual who hit quota, show their performance to plan and include a small note about them (1 to 2 sentences at most)
• The email is more important than you expect. The team will look forward to it each month

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Send Handwritten Letters

Send a handwritten letter to each person who hit 100% of their quota. The team will LOVE this. They will put it on their fridge. They will show it to their spouse. They will tell their mom about it. They will become attached to their personal successes and they will associate the success with your team.

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Quota Club Lunch

Make it a ritual to take all of your monthly quota hitters to lunch (or quarterly if that’s how you run your team). Include the ramping reps, this is important to establish that the team cares about success. Make it a big deal. Book a nice place. Let people get dressed up. Make it a long lunch and let the Quota Club have the afternoon off. This will become a source of pride for most in the Quota Club. It will create gravity toward hitting your goals. It will set the expectation of success.

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President’s Club‍

This is an annual trip for top performers. It’s important to the reps. It’s another badge of honor and something that your top performers work toward and look forward to all year long. Go somewhere exotic. Let the top performers bring their significant other. Make it an incredible experience. Track progress toward President's Club all year long and make it competitive.

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Start working on your success today

We’ve talked about dozens of things that you can do to move your team toward a sales success culture. You don’t have to do all of it, or even half of it, to start achieving results. You just need to start. Pick one concept from this essay and take an action TODAY to implement it.

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The sales success culture is a never-ending journey for you and your team. You will never be finished with the job. The team will grow, the culture will change, and you will have to evolve your rhythms. The one constant that your team should experience as a part of your team culture is that success is important, it is rewarded, and it is an expectation that everyone on the team is intentional and deliberate about being successful. Because if they don’t want to be successful, what do they want?