How to Develop Your Sales Team to Maximize Revenue, with Yekemi Otaru

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Welcome to the Listen perspective. I'm your host, Rebecca Hastings. I've spent over a decade working with executives in the tech sector, and help successful companies build their leadership teams and scale. During my career, I've been lucky to have the privilege of learning from many exceptional leaders. In these conversations, you'll get perspectives from peers, be inspired, and learn what it takes to become one of the best.
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This is your chance to listen to experts talking about the challenges, solutions, and the vital insights they've gained in their careers to date.
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Some people think that if you're being sent on training, or you're being given a coach, it means that you're not good at your job, and you need to practice whereas it's really a case of continuous learning and improvement, because the market is changing, and you need to keep on top of that.
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Hi, Kami, thanks for joining me today, I want to dive straight into what's going to be a really insightful talk for sales leaders or anybody with revenue responsibility. You recently released some research on the state of sales skills in the UK and SMEs within the UK. I thought it was really interesting because it covers not just hiring, which obviously fascinates me. But the things that are also important for someone being successful in a sales role, like onboarding, training, driving revenue, building that long term success in your sales team, really? So what are the most pressing challenges you're seeing sales leaders encounter just now?
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Thanks for having me, Rebecca. Yeah, I mean, the conversations that we've been having with sales leaders over the last few months have been really insightful. And one of the things are top of mind for them is whether they have the right team to achieve their goals over the next 12 months, we're coming out of, you know, a few different difficult times, you know, we've had a downturn, we've had COVID, we've had a cost of living crisis, and leaders are really thinking about whether they've got the right resources in their team to achieve those goals. The other thing that they're looking at is whether they can really validate the opportunities that they've got within their sales pipeline, you know, if a salesperson is put in, there's an opportunity of a million pounds. How did they validate that? How did their verify that how do they understand the probability of that opportunity Landon, the third part of it is really whether the current sales team have the skills that it takes to succeed right now, because the market has has kind of changed and what buyers are looking for has changed. For instance, when you look at digital skills, I think more and more, the absence of digital skills provides a lower likelihood that the salesperson is going to be successful. So even salespeople that have been historically really successful and have exceeded their target, are starting to struggle because of this whole idea that buyers are looking to have less react less interaction with salespeople until they're further down in not buying cycle, and are very much preferring to engage with salespeople on a digital platform. And so there are some skills there that salespeople are needed to, to look at. So overall, it has to do with Do we have the right people? And how, how confident I am I in the in the sales pipeline? And finally, does my team have the skills to succeed in what is becoming a digital space,
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the piece of additional skills is really interesting, because it is slightly different from what people have looked for within sales professionals over the last decade or so. And it's not just the digital skills, there's like other competencies and soft skills that go alongside that around communication and just how you articulate yourself, but not just in terms of grammar, and you know, in written English, you know, it's also quite like attracting attention.
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And then using like appropriate imagery, it's a bit more complex for some people,
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it really is. And in the digital space, you might not have the benefit of that body language and, and so on. So it does take a slightly different set of skills, which are not terribly difficult to learn, but it is a big change, especially for people who have been in the industry for decades. You know, they're used to that in person conversation and being on the golf course and, and building relationships that way. And I would still say that that is still probably the best way to build relationships and build trust quickly. But the kind of age that we're getting into now means that the opportunity to meet people face to face is is still still low. You know, we haven't fully come out of the of the pandemic. And I think even after, you know, we come out with the pandemic, some of the benefits of not needing to travel and meet in person The convenience of being able to get on a zoom or teams call, the convenience of using social media to reach a, you know, a crowd of people is really, I think it's here to stay. So salespeople need to understand how to translate their messaging into a visual format that engages an audience builds trust quickly, and actually gets those relationships to a point where somebody wants to do business with you having in some cases never met you.
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Yeah, it really is a fascinating shift, and one that I think the recruitment and search sector has also been going through over the last five, six years.
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Yeah, I think it's gonna affect all sectors, to be honest, anyone dealing with end user in the b2b space.
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So you're the chief growth officer at DeCaro, which is a b2b sales enablement consultancy, you're working with high tech clients and technology companies. But I know you've also been a successful entrepreneur. And before that you had a career in oil and gas as an engineer, which is just really interesting as a transition for me. But you're also the Chancellor of the University of West of Scotland, and we're on the board of interphase, which helps drive innovation through business and academia collaborating. And if there's not enough, believe you're also a global Scott ambassador. So like, it's just a wonder you're interested in skills with that kind of like variety of things that brought you to where you are just now.
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Tell us why. What is it about sales skills that you find really fascinating?
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It's a good question.
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And I have to say, I haven't always been interested in sales skills. In fact, for most of my career, I avoided sales. And when I moved from engineering roles into what we started calling technical sales, and ultimately I moved into marketing, my managers always kind of slightly gently nudged me into sales and felt like I was good, and people are good at presenting. But I worried about being in sales, because I worried about having a target on my back, I watched other salespeople, and I didn't quite like how they did sales, I felt that, you know, in terms of credibility and trust that people didn't seem to warm up to salespeople, you know, if you were at a networking event, and you handed over your business card, and it's a sales manager on it, people try to avoid you, because they assume that you're going to sell to them, or you're going to talk too much. And so all this imagery, imagery around me around what a salesperson looked like, really deterred me from, from being in sales to be to be quite honest. And then as time went on, and I started seeing the strong links between what I was doing in marketing and what was happening in sales, and found what I think we all know, it's well documented and written about the heavy misalignment between sales and marketing that we find, especially in the b2b space. So I found that regardless of how good your marketing is, if sales isn't there, if sales isn't almost like that, to deliver the baby, as it were, then it doesn't really matter. It's a waste of money. And you spend your whole time really trying to justify your existence as a marketing person, and sales, regardless of how good you are at sales, it is very laborious.
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If you don't have that marketing support, you don't have the right messaging, you're not using the right channels, and you're fully just dependent on a few salespeople to talk to everyone and anyone. So I saw the struggling between sales and marketing. That's where sales skills became something on my, on my radar. And then to Cairo.
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We started out being quite marketing heavy. But then we noticed this intense sales gap, if you like, just around sales development, we noticed there wasn't a lot of investment in sales skills. People didn't really know what competencies a salesperson needed to have. And you would hear things like oh, he's good with folk, you know, he'll be fine in sales. And you know, the fact that you were friendly, and extroverted was enough to put you into sales.
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And there was this, I guess, certainly an impression that if there was nowhere else to put someone in an organization sales is probably the right option.
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And the kind of investment that companies were putting into their engineering department, HR, finance, you just weren't putting that in sales. And that was perplexing for me, especially because regardless of the industry, you're in sales is really important. Even if you're a charity or a social enterprise, you need to sell a vision and idea and so you do need sales composite competencies around that. So in Scotland in particular, I think we're investing a lot in r&d and startups and helping them scale up. And the absence of sales skills mean that it's just going to be slower because even if you've got clever innovation, clever piece of tech, if you can't sell it, no one will buy.
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Exactly. And I can relate a lot to that based on the things I've seen in technology. Companies and software companies over the last like decade, I do think sales is finally starting to be viewed a bit more professionally within businesses, people very much and maybe COVID was a bit of a jolt to the system around this. They recognize that like revenue is the lifeblood of their business.
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Without sales that can potentially be a challenge for you to have consistently. And the, I think, you know, social media is attracted like new people into sales. And we've now learned how to use data much more effectively to really hone in target our approach. We're not the kind of like, I can't imagine any businesses are going out without any kind of purpose and direction or back to the days of a Yellow Pages situation. So I'd love to hear more about your research findings. And obviously, I've got lots of opinions around hiring, so it's probably a good idea to get them out there sooner rather than later. So please, however, tell us, what are the key things that you uncovered in your research about hiring salespeople?
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Yeah. So I mean, some of the things we did uncover that wasn't surprised about it kind of had a hunch. And just to, to kind of set the scene we interviewed 12 business leaders as part of this. And then we talked to two other kind of experts to react to our research, but primarily, we talked to 12, business leaders, 10 of them are kind of Scottish based businesses, and the other two are in England, the things that really stood out for me was that there was a nervousness around hiring salespeople overall, I knew that, you know, in terms of being a small business, people are quite careful about who they hire, because it's, it feels like a family, and people want to hire who they know. So that didn't really surprise me that leaders tended to depend on their personal networks, for hiring people, I understand the benefits of that, because, you know, it's a, which is a trust thing is the fact that I know this person, I know that they you know, they'll do a good job type of thing. But also that element of limiting the talent pool to just the people you know, and I think with sales, in particular, if you are looking for the best talent and you've got ambitious targets, then that's potentially a disadvantage where you're limiting your pool. What surprised me though, around the hiring side was this feeling that what we would see as a great salesperson would potentially be a bad fit for certain cultures. So some of the leaders have this feeling that a salesperson would be, you know, aggressive, talkative, highly extroverted and, and that might not sit well with their culture, because the culture was quite, you know, calm, friendly, customer focused. And this whole, I guess, imagery of what a salesperson is, was getting in the way a little bit around that. And I understood that because like I said, at the start, I did have that sort of vision of what a salesperson looked like, you know, obviously, kind of 20 years ago, when I was a young engineer. But it is holding back some businesses from hiring great salespeople, because they're worried that there's not going to be a fit with the culture.
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That was one of the kind of interesting findings there. What was uplifting, was the fact that most companies had some kind of structure around hiring, you know, they had, you know, the first part of the process where they would speak to the candidate, maybe over the phone, or online, get to know them a little bit. And then there was a more kind of formal interview where they might present something to the group that might give them something to prepare and come and present to the group. And then it was usually a third phase, where maybe the best candidates had a more in depth interview with maybe the senior leaders of the organization. So regardless of how small the organization was, I wasn't hearing people just kind of hiring people over one call. They were going through some kind of hiring process, which was uplifting to see when it then came to onboarding, that's where things kind of weren't so great. You know, few people were talking about just coming on board, especially they were hired in recent times during the COVID times, just coming in, and really just having to find where information was was no kind of onboarding.
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Some companies did an element of onboarding, but it wasn't it wasn't deep enough.
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Yeah, there's often an afterthought and something that's tagged on, you know, once somebody has been appointed, maybe sometimes it's only dealt with just like the Friday before the Monday there Jetstar. But, I mean, like listening to what you're saying there about onboarding and hiring, it makes me think you know, that nerve SNESs and how it can be alleviated. I think that it's great that people have that structure. And that's definitely the way to go. But if you want to reduce the nervousness further, then it's like going through a process of working out what you need from that person at the start, and making sure that you're assessing against it, you know, if you've already got a good process in place, it's just really reframing it and doing some of that work upfront to understand what you need to achieve your business goals and work back from there that can really help. And then that would be great to align with onboarding. Because if you know, what you need someone to achieve, and what they need to be doing, you know, saying like the first 30 days and 90 days of their role to be successful, you're gonna get more out of that person, you're gonna have a much better onboarding plan for them. And, you know, that's, that's going to be something which is only going to bolster everyone's success. So what did you guys learn about onboarding from your research?
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Oh, you, you made a really good point that I just want to touch on quickly. So one thing that was clear, without most companies didn't really know, the skills to look for, there was some confusion, for instance, between what a salesperson does and what a business development person does. And so it was really just hiring people who had some sales experience on their CVs. And then they joined the organization. And the ones that do some kind of onboarding, will maybe get them up to speed with health and safety stuff. They will get to be their line manager get to me their team a little bit. The really great onboarding processes, were getting people up to speed with their vision and some of the culture side of things, how to do things around you. But most of the onboarding tended to stop out right here, the hills and Safety Manual. Here's your line manager, this is your desk, and your computer, and then a bunch of files on different places on the internet go, yeah, go go look at it type thing. And it was interesting, because a lot of these people came into the organization with some form of sales experience. But there wasn't that onboarding to help understand their kind of marketplace, the actual buyer personas in this particular organization, even looking at the systems, you know, do they have a CRM, how do they work sales process, those kind of details that you would want someone to understand so that they have a really good chance of success in that role, especially as you were talking about kind of the 90 day, the first kind of 90 days, because the better the onboarding process. Research shows that a person who's got a really good and detailed onboarding process is something like 58% more likely to perform well in that role.
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Wow. And I mean that, I find that quite interesting, because a lot of the things that you mentioned there like understanding your buyer personas, understanding your marketplace, knowing how to get maximum leverage, if your CRM, those are the things that give us competitive advantage.
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And we put huge amounts of effort into deciding defining, upgrading, investing in as businesses. And yet that like last step of training people in all of those things is missing.
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Because it's an all use it just staying inside one person's head that's never going to scale
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isn't going to scale and knowledge kind of goes away with people they leave and then the knowledge is lost. I think one of the probably the most surprising finding was that companies that are heavily dependent on their sales teams to generate revenue. So for instance, if a company has some kind of recurring revenue every month that covers say 60% of their costs, then it means that they're dependent on their sales team to bring in at least 40%, even just to break even. And if you want to make a profit more than that, so every month, they need to sell something to cover the cost. So those companies tended to be the least likely to provide a strong onboarding process and subsequent training, which I found really surprising.
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So the more dependent they were on these people to deliver, the less likely they were to train them. So initially, it sounded a bit like that's a big conflict.
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And what is that? Well, actually, we think about it, it's understandable because they're so busy being reactive and the pressure so much that it's a case of we just don't have time to put people on training courses. Those salespeople don't have time to be on training, or to be on board. We need them to hit the ground, running as it were. And in some cases, people hit the ground and and their legs break because they're not actually getting the support that they need to achieve the goal. So it's a bit of a vicious cycle there where Don't hit the ground running, they don't have enough of the support. There's also a level of impatience in this companies, Rebecca, where if they don't deliver by certain number of months, they're kind of out the door, and there's not that patient with it. And also on the salesperson side of things, the expectations might be mismatched. So there's a bit of a vicious cycle there. And I'm sure you've seen that within the work that you do.
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Yeah, I've seen it within recruitment businesses, but I've also seen it within companies. And when you said that, I was immediately like, they're just too busy. No one's ever taken time to stop and think, and, you know, how can we do this smarter, it may be, you know, a week out of somebody's work, but they could as simple as like, just make a series of videos, so that whenever new people join, they watch them. But I, I've worked in a business where that was starting to happen. And we very quickly got sales coaches, and learning and development involved, because it is a huge risk. And I think the sad thing about it, though, is it's one that you only see immediately, if you've already been through that before a few times, and it's gone wrong, and you know, what you're watching out for, and you can see everyone's falling into the trap, it's an easy trap to do, because especially salespeople, they get sales, people are kind of quite driven to do activity. So they're going to try and get on with it, they've got lots of self confidence in their abilities a lot of the time. But it is just, you know, absolutely vital that if you cannot do that yourself, that you're looking for some extra resource, be it you know, another hire into your people team, or getting some outside help, because you're wasting a lot of money. The opportunity cost of salespeople who come in and fail is huge.
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It is huge. It is huge.
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And it's one of the highest attrition that you find out there between 14 months and 18 months is the average tenure of a salesperson. And some of these companies have sales cycles of, you know, one to three years in some cases, so like manufacturing, and so on, could be one to three years. So that looking at looking at that people would be in your business and not actually be in there long enough to see, to see an opportunity from start to finish. So why wouldn't you give them the support and the onboarding and the training that they need to achieve their goals? Totally. Yeah, it's, it's really, it's really tough. But I think companies more and more are seeing that salespeople need the same investment, even, maybe even more so in their abilities.
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And I love how one one of our clients, but recently, you said when Rooney doesn't take free kicks, because he needs to practice his free kicks, right?
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It just takes weeks because he needs to adapt to keep doing it.
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Right? So yes, I do have training. Sometimes I think some, some people think that if you're being sent on training, or you're being given a coach, it means that you're not good at your job. And you need to, you need to practice whereas it's really a case of continuous learning and improvement, because the market is changing.
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And you need to keep on top of that.
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And when I'm speaking to candidates, like training is a huge selling point for top talent. We all want people who've got a growth mindset in our business. And those are people who've got like a really positive attitude to learning. They know they don't have all the answers, they want to progress and develop themselves. So what would be your like Top Tips beyond onboarding for investing in the development of our sales teams?
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Ooh, I think the first thing is to really have a good understanding of what you need in the business, I think before you even go out hiring, that whole the job description piece, and really understanding the skill sets that you need. Sales is I would say it's a lot like marketing where it's vast, and no one is good at everything sales. You know, it's like, you know, in marketing, you've got advertising and PR content marketing, social media, copywriting, and when you say and marketing people just have a certain vision of what it is you're good at. But actually, you're usually good at one or two things, you have your bread and butter. So it's it's like that wood sale. So understand whether you need a hunter in your business, and you know, whether you need an account manager, you know, you need somebody who's really good at qualifying and negotiating, you know, understanding that, because that is going to be really crucial. And so the first step, especially if you're going to be heavily dependent on the salesperson to bring in revenue is to invest in a really strong onboarding process. I mean, it could make or break this the success of this salesperson. So really invest in that. And that like you were saying earlier, it could be it's one week of their time, and make sure that you create space for them to continue to learn throughout their time as a salesperson and make it easy for them to access resources. And that doesn't need to be a significant budget is one of these things that you create, probably once and review it annually. And it's there like videos and an existing case studies and documents around your your buyer persona. I think companies just put an effort to do that once just do that, and then have a way of reviewing it annually, making sure it's still up to date is really, really important. And then sit with your salesperson and get feedback. You know, what's that useful? How has that impacted how you sell, and your understanding of our marketplace? And ultimately, how, how well you're able to define and identify opportunities for the business.
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I agree with a lot of what you're saying, Now, we've covered a bit about getting the right team and skills. One of the things that you said at the start that I just want to pick up again, is you said like when the challenges that people are having as their own validating opportunities? How can we get better at that? Because that is obviously on a lot of people's minds just know.
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Yeah. And have different different ways. But if we go back to the whole sales process, I mean, the number of companies that don't really have a sales process, or they have one, it's not really, you know, documented, or everyone's kind of doing different things. I think that's the first step is to really look at what you've got in place just now. And when I say sales process, I mean, how do you look for opportunity? So prospecting, how do you then look at those opportunities and decide what is actually something we can cater for others in this organization, so that qualifying piece and have some criteria around that. So for instance, you have criteria around the budget that the buyer has, and have criteria around whether you're actually dealing with the decision maker within the organization, and have them understanding around timeline and urgency for that opportunity, and whether they actually have a need for this product or service? Because yeah, some things are nice to have. But if there isn't a deep need, where there's some kind of timeline, then the chances are that opportunity is going to land sooner ever, obviously, kind of dropped significantly.
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And then want to do that be ready to to tackle the objections, you know, are you talking to objections? Is there more than one decision maker there are committee? What are the stakeholders? And do they understand that you are the best solution to their challenge? And if they don't, what are you doing about it? So sometimes you will have a sales pipeline or a bunch of different opportunities. And when you start leaning into it, and understanding what who exactly you speak into in that organization, you might find actually, it's not the decision maker, and it's a middle manager who actually needs to become your salesperson internally, if you like. And then you might want to, you might want to fix that and make sure that you're building multiple touch points, or the project is not that important. And the company has got a lot of priorities. And so even though the salesperson has said he's going to close next week, he probably isn't going to close next week, because they're all their priorities in the business. So it's having that sales process on the right, I suppose, milestones within those sales processes, that can really help to understand whether this is a real opportunity that can close soon, or if ever,
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total, totally, I think that, you know, it's going a bit more beyond like understanding your user persona, but actually making sure that people know, these are our ideal customers. This is where marketing or directing all their energy, making sure that everyone's aligned getting things joined up. Because you can't, I mean, you said you can't really sell to someone who doesn't have any leader desire to purchase and the number of times that salespeople just keep things in there, like how they bought from in the past, like they might buy from you again.
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But you do not need to be speaking to them every month.
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That's not a good use of your time. Or sales, people are getting distracted by shiny new things. New people,
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nobody know about that, oh, have a Happy New Year, as we call it, where they have a conversation and they come away think oh, that was amazing.
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Definitely going to buy. And if you're just, you know, they go what we call happy ears. They just hear positive positive when actually, the person might have just been being polite and just listening and nodding. And so yeah, that could be we could probably use that. And then it ends up in your sales funnel.
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And you're like, yeah, that's gonna close next month, when in fact, no, you just maybe heard what you wanted to hear in that conversation. So it's really about asking the right questions and really uncovering a need to buy
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and having the confidence to ask those questions. If I can think of a few people over the years that they know what the questions are. They're just never like feel like they're ready to put themselves out there and actually say them.
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Yeah, I understand that. And I think it's one that Allah was going to do with that song. stages are the other, or should I ask that. And one of the things that we measure through our data driven to our own competencies are things like desire to be to be approved off, for instance, which is not necessarily connected with sales, but might be something in your in your character, or even just your upbringing, and it's not necessarily a bad thing in real life. But if you're overly preoccupied with being, you know, liked and having approval, there are certain questions that you will be needing to ask your buyer, but you hold back because you think, Oh, am I? Am I asking too many questions are my maybe ruffling feathers a little bit.
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So if the buyer is doing a certain kind of process or workflow that you know, you know, as an expert, that actually it's not optimal, you need to have the confidence to be a consultative seller in that situation and challenge and ask certain questions. Like if you're overly preoccupied with being approved or worried about ruffling feathers, and you might hold back, for instance, and those are some of the things that we would look at.
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And, as manager, it's also really important to look out for that within your team and help support people through that.
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Because it's not always easy.
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Not everyone has the self awareness to immediately appreciate that there's something that they could do slightly shifting their mindset, that can have a huge impact.
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Yeah, and a lot of the time, it's about self awareness.
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People become aware. And they're like, oh, okay, that's true. I do do that, you know, and that can, that can actually bring a change. It's that level of self awareness. We absolutely right.
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When it comes to sales management, that's almost like another big discussion, because, you know, the sales and sales management are actually very different things. And the number of sales managers that are not actually managing sales is really high. Actually, in any part of sales management, you should be coaching your team and helping them through things like that need for approval, and how they can find ways to, to cope with that, and how they can overcome those kinds of things that might stand in their way.
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Things like active listening, you know, you're in a conversation with a buyer. And it'd be natural for you to just wait for them to finish their sentence. So you can see another amazing thing about your product, rather than actually listening to what they're saying. And responding to that.
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And that can be quite tough, especially for people that have less experience, and maybe even already nervous in that conversation. And they just need to remember to say this, this particular benefit of our product, and they're not really listening to what the buyer is saying, and they couldn't cover so much by by listening. A good sales manager can work with someone like that to help them help them overcome that and develop that self awareness and skills around them.
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Some excellent advice there. So we touched on earlier salespeople are obsessed with LinkedIn, you've been through LinkedIn, create your program and a very engaged following. Tell us how can you stand out on LinkedIn when it's becoming so saturated? Just know.
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It's tough, isn't it to stand out on any social media?
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LinkedIn in particular has over 900 million users, I think last time I checked, and more people are creating content, especially with obviously COVID meant a lot of people were on there creating content. But I still think the principles still apply. If you have a good understanding of who your audience is, who you're trying to attract, and you understand their pain points, the challenges that they're facing day to day in what they're trying to achieve. And you also understand the desired outcomes, you know, what is it that life can you know, what is it that they can achieve? How would life look like if they could solve those challenges, then you start to create content and have conversations around that. And people that you know, it applies to stop and they would read that content. There are a few different ways of actually creating engagement within your own audience. So for instance, I have quite a few followers, but sometimes I feel like I haven't engaged with them one on one in months, or even years. And so occasionally, I will send a private message to check in on those people, and to just really build a relationship with them. I think sometimes people forget that. Platforms like LinkedIn or like real life where, when you're, when you're building relationships, you need to ask people, how they're doing and what's going on with them.
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And it's not just about sharing your stuff, and talking about your goods and services. And that's why with some of the content I put out, in fact, most of the content I put out, is actually what you turn off probably personal. Where, you know, I'm talking about things I'm learning as a leader as an entrepreneur. Sometimes I will touch on something that's going on maybe with my children And because some of my audience are parents, and some of them have triggered my age, and then people connect to you on a human level. And what happens is that they start looking out for your content, right? I think there's enough for everyone. So I started looking out for your content, because you are, you're feeding more than just a professional need is also that emotional trigger. So to really stand out, show an understanding of who you're trying to attract, don't just create content for content sake, connect on a human level. And apart from publishing content on your feed, reach out to people that are connected to you, and people that follow you on people you follow, reach out to them in their LinkedIn messages, ask how they're doing, and build a relationship, build trust. And over time, that will definitely you recruit,
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don't just collect connections. But I love that tip you had there about how you know put some of that personal content is really engaging, a lot of people are a bit scared of putting themselves out there personally. But the thing that I picked up on was that learning, you're talking about what you've learned, that's something that anybody can talk about, it's not something which means you have to put up a picture of your dog or your children or your house up there. If that's not what you want to do, it still means that there's a lot of opportunity there. So I guess, you're thinking about what's going to keep that kind of emotional connection with people, is what I'm going to take forward, there's been so much that's been covered here has been really fascinating. So I'd encourage anyone who'd like to see a copy of your report to reach out to you on LinkedIn, obviously, where, where you spend much of your time. But before we wrap up are the top three things you'd suggest we look at in our businesses, as sales leaders, like if we're serious about maximizing our revenue? Yeah, I
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think one thing that hasn't really come out in this conversation, and it's absolutely important is sales performance is crucial. And hiring the right salespeople is crucial. But make sure you have a strong foundation, or you've got a culture that allows those people thrive. So culture that I suggest, you know, have accountability within it has a learning is a learning environment where people feel that they can try things. And even if they feel it's not that big a deal. It's you know, you try something and it didn't work, and then you learn the lessons from it. And then you move on to something else. I think that's the role of leaders to create an environment where people feel that they can learn and they can thrive and they can grow. The only thing I would recommend is taking a step back when it comes to hiring salespeople and not just going straight to your personal network or zooming not someone that was good at sales and Company A will be fine up sales for your company, just really taking a step back and work with people, you know, external consultants if you need to, to uncover the skills that you need for this role to be successful.
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And I really encourage leaders to give more thought to that.
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And finally, once that person is in your organization, give them the best chance of success by onboarding them properly, by providing the tools that they need to be successful, whether that's a great CRM system, whether that's a good way to integrate with marketing so that they get the benefits of that around sales. And whether that is bringing in a sales coach to make sure that you know, week to week, month to month, this person is thriving, and they're not stuck. And there's literally no no bottleneck in the way. So those are the three things I would say, pay attention to culture and creating a learning environment. Pay attention to the skills that you need, even before you bring someone on board, make sure you have a good understanding of the competencies that they need to succeed in your organization.
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And once they are in your organization, take care of them, give them opportunities to learn, start on the right foot where they've got the right onboarding. They understand your vision, your culture, they understand your buyer persona.
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And yeah, and continue providing opportunities to learn.
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That's so interesting, I think we're gonna have to do a follow up at some point. And because there's so many things that I'd love to discuss with my time like that, you know, you've touched on building sales culture there, especially within like technology and high tech manufacturing kind of businesses, that that sometimes means making technical people and sales people and getting them comfortable with it. So we'll have to pick up on that as a separate issue and then discuss the the role of building like diversity in your sales team, what that means to customers and why I think we all know a lot of the benefits, but like some practical tips on how we can really accelerate that and then accelerate the benefits from it. So I'm excited about that. Hopefully, we'll have you back to go over them. So as I said, If anyone wants to get in touch, both our contact details are below This has been really fascinating. And if you've got any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to either of us.
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Thank you very much for having me, Rebecca. I've had a good time. Thank you
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Thanks for listening to the Listen perspective. I'm Rebecca de St.
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Founder and Director at the Listen group, a tech sector executive search and talent consultancy. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with others, post about it on social media or leave a rating and review. If you're a company looking to hire top technology leaders, or you'd like to discuss your next move, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or send