These days, you hear a lot about company culture. But what is it, really?
Is “company culture” a buzzword for the hip, unconventional office environment that attracts millenials? Or is “company culture” lifted from the pages of the latest fad business book?
The answer: not at all. In fact, company culture is nothing new. It’s an essential part of any business, and building a strong culture that motivates is an essential part of running a top-tier direct sales team.
What Is Company Culture?
To put it simply, company culture is the collaboration of incentives, leadership, and core values that establish the identity of an organization. Every company has its own culture, for good and for ill.
It’s something that’s hard to describe, but pretty easy to see. It’s the living, breathing organism that keeps your team moving while you, as a leader, are on vacation. (Or sleeping, if that’s a thing you do.)
Sharing a common company culture helps your sales team speak the same language and stay on the same page when it comes to issues like values, goals, and expectations.
How Can You Identify Healthy & Unhealthy Company Culture?
Your sales team already has a culture. Is it constructive or destructive? There are some indicators of good and bad company culture that you can keep your eye out for:
Bad Company Culture
Toxic company culture can poison your sales team from within. It can torpedo your team’s results, ruin their confidence, and negatively impact your employee turnover. An unhealthy company culture is an unhealthy company.
Does your sales team’s culture need rescuing? Look for the following signs:
- Your sales team doesn’t communicate
- The team isn’t engaged or motivated to achieve common goals
- Your sales team doesn’t have a good understanding of goals and expectations
If any of these warning signs are present, look to your team’s leaders. Do they understand the culture, the values, the message you’re trying to get across? If they don’t understand the message, or don’t agree with it, they won’t be able to communicate it effectively to the rest of the team.
Having leaders that are out of step with the company’s vision can poison the well of the team’s culture… and that means that either your message or the leaders in question need to be changed.
Regardless, an organization where the vision and the team are out of sync is an organization with a culture that needs to be addressed.
Good Company Culture
In contrast, the best company culture is filled with team members who are engaged, motivated, and willing to raise up other members of the team.
A healthy company culture:
- Has a clear organizational message, incorporating shared values and mission statements
- Has a clear organizational goal that is shared with the team, so that they are a part of where the company is headed
- Gets together socially and has lots of opportunity to communicate about their personal goals in relation to the goals shared by the team.
In a healthy company culture, there is no disconnect between the company’s vision, the leadership, and the sales team members. Everyone pulls in the same direction and does their part to achieve the organization’s goals.
How To Build Good Company Culture
If good company culture is determined by how well the team works to accomplish shared organizational goals, it only stands to reason that the first step towards building a healthy company culture is to establish solid goals for your company.
Organizational goals should be tangible, measurable, and easily communicated to the sales team. Salespeople are social animals. They want to feel a part of the company’s success, which is why it’s important to bring them in on goals that are easily shared.
Top-down goals tend not to stick. You need the company vision to go viral and take root at every level of the organization. A good way to do this is to set up a series of small, common goals… or determine a common enemy that your team can rally together to defeat! Nothing quite motivates and unites a sales team like a little healthy competition with a rival organization. Regardless, make sure you communicate goals in a way that celebrates how everybody in the company wins.
This can be tough to do in a small organization where you’re building culture from scratch, which is why it can be a good idea to partner with a larger organization with an established company culture that can help support and motivate your team.
If you’re interested in taking your sales team culture to the next level, Solcomm wants to hear from you. We support telecom direct sales firms with the resources and culture to find epic success within their communities. Learn what it takes to become a Solcomm Subdealer today!