How do I create my “dream team” sales force?

Assembling a “dream team” sales force is not as difficult as you may at first think. I’ve known of businesses reaching great heights through the salesmanship of only a few sales guns!

Before creating a “dream team” you need to have at least one exceptional salesperson you can model. Whether this person is the company founder (if sales savvy) or a senior leader, there must be a working best-practice sales process you can model and replicate.

Once you have a high performing salesperson to model: their core characteristics, behaviours and activities, then form the blueprint (DNA) of your “dream team”.

Keeping in mind that it’s okay to have varying personalities in the same team, this enables your team to demonstrate versatility and engage a diverse customer base. You don’t need to ‘literally’ clone sales team members to replicate successfully, but they must all have at the very least, what I call, the C-FACTOR.

Charisma & Confidence: Personality is paramount in sales. The energy and enthusiasm you demonstrate towards your customers is very important. Equally so, is your ability to positively connect with and engage people and make them feel important. There is a lot to be said for confidence in any area of life. In sales, if you’re not confident you will struggle to manifest the most important element in sales: trust. Customers will sense (and fear) your lack of confidence in either your own selling ability or in what you are selling. When your customers feel fear this makes it almost impossible to build their trust and lead them successfully through your sales process.

Commonality & Cohesion: We naturally sell to and buy from people we like or share a likeness with. The old cliché: “People buy from friends – not salespeople”, is so true. We naturally trust people that validate who we are, ie. our beliefs, values and opinions. And we go to great lengths to surround ourselves with liked-minded people; this also includes salespeople. The most successful sales teams I’ve been involved with share their ideas and opinions constructively and work towards common goals.

Competence & Commitment: You have to know your stuff. Invariably, competence derives from taking a genuine interest in what you are doing and a commitment to stick with it long enough until you’re good at it, more so, great at it! You can look the part and talk it up with the best of them, but if you consistently let people down and drop the ball, it’s only a matter of time before your incompetence catches-up with you.

Successful sales teams can have different personalities and opinions and even contrasting communication styles – but they all must have the C-FACTOR. Each salesperson should also align with and live by a core set of values. This makes setting-up and developing the right sales culture critical, particularly when creating a “dream team” sales force.

Trent Leyshan is the founder and CEO of BOOM Sales! a leading sales training and sales development specialist.

He is also the creator of The NAKED Salesman, BOOMOLOGY! RetroService, and the Empathy Selling Process.

For more Selling Strategies advice, click here.