Are you a sales leader, sales, professional executive, maybe you're a business owner and
you've got some sales people working for you, but they're not working for you as well as you'd like,
they're not really working as a team. They're more of a, like a group of wild Cowboys. Is that
the situation you're facing? Because if so, you're going to want to watch this video where I'm going
to walk you through exactly how you can build what I call a self-managed sales team. Sounds
interesting. Make sure you stay tuned and I'll walk you through exactly how you can do that.
Make sure also that you hit the subscribe button so you can stay up to date and all the videos I'm
releasing on strategies to help you accelerate your sales results and ultimately sell more
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So at least you'll be notified when it comes out and also make sure you comment below with
any questions you have. I love to hear from those who are watching these videos that lets me know
I'm not just standing in a room by myself doing this. Uh, so make sure you comment on any ideas
and additional input you have relative to the topic so that we can build this out and make
it a great resource for anybody that visits. I'm Shawn Casemore and I have been selling
since I was 11 years old. I know that sounds crazy. It's true. Check out my website. You
read all about it, but more importantly, the last 20 years I've been studying the habits of
top performing sales professionals, doing a lot of coaching and advisory work. And I've learned
so much in my whole goal here is to share these strategies with you.
So you have tips and tactics on what's working in today's environment to help you sell more.
Ultimately, so today we're going to talk about building what I call a self-managed sales team.
So if you're a sales leader at any level, or even a business owner, you want a sales team that works
together, works collaboratively and can drive results in and amongst themselves
without so much guidance and prompting from you, right? You should. So if that's the case,
I've got a number of steps. I'm going to walk you through to build that team. So let's jump in to
step number one, step number one in building out a self-managed sales team is that each and every
salesperson on your team, there needs to be a level playing field. Here's what I mean by that
those team members need to understand themselves. You cannot work collaboratively in a team.
If you first don't understand a little bit about yourself now, what does that mean? Well,
you can have them do some simple assessment of some kind, any kind, really, and have a
conversation about the results, right? So it could be Myers-Briggs it could be disc and you name it.
There's all sorts of assessments out there, but the goal is not the assessment itself.
The goal is to get some neutral input that you can then have a conversation with them about.
So you get to learn a little bit more about the individual, but then they get to learn
more about themselves. So let me give you an example of this. My style, when I first did
the disc assessment decades ago was something like a, a D I and I think CS or something like
that. Right? So what does that mean? Well, I'm a driver, but my eyes also up there.
So I like to talk, go figure here I am talking, right? And then sees next,
which is the analytical piece. But what it really broke down for me is why I wanted
to be an entrepreneur. Why wanted to be business owners? Cause I'm a driver I'm focused on results,
right? So you will get the same input and that will help the team themselves understand more
about themselves and what is behind why they think the way they think, why they behave,
the way they behave. And that information then can be used to build more of an understanding of
the broader team. But other times, when I do work with teams, we start with an assessment
and then we share the assessment amongst the group so that each and every person understands
the strengths, the weaknesses, the pros, the cons of the rest of the people on the team.
And most importantly, they create in their minds the best approach when they want to
work with somebody, because you don't want to go to somebody, who's a driver for example,
and bring them six mountains of information for them to go through. They're not going to do it.
They're gonna be annoyed by it. So this sets that level playing field and is the foundation for
building your self-managed team. The second step to building a self-managed team is to do what I
call lower the curtain in a lot of organizations, especially those that I've worked with each sales
person, each sales professional has their own territory, their own customer lists,
maybe their own products or services that they sell. Unfortunately, not everybody is
always selling the same things. Now, sometimes they are, but usually there's some distinctions
and this can create environment where people sales professionals start to believe that.
Well, what I'm doing is more difficult than what you're doing,
right? My job is harder than your job, and that creates a barrier to the team working together.
So you want to lower the curtain. You want to ensure that every sales person on the team
understands what other people are working on. And more importantly understands the challenges other
people face. Now that can happen over time through one of the next steps I'm going to talk about,
which is the sharing of information through daily meeting, it, people call them scrums. I don't, but
regardless that daily meeting where you can talk about what's on your agenda. But what I strongly
recommend you do is that take each salesperson and pair them up with another sales person. Now,
if you've got a hundred people you'd want to group these people in a logical fashion,
but if you've only got a handful of salespeople, this is easy to be put together to be arranged.
And what you do is you have them work with each other for a period of a week,
right? Pick slower times, pick busier times you decide, but the more the salespeople can
understand the world of the other salespeople, the greater the camaraderie and collaboration
will be amongst the team. And for you, the best bet is you're doing some cross training here
that will ensure that if the other person leaves or goes on vacation, at least somebody has an idea
what's going on in their region, right? So lower the curtain and create that common understanding
of what each and every person within the team is working on. Hey, make sure you hit that subscribe
button. If you're enjoying these tips and you'll be notified of each and every video we released,
there's plenty of videos on my YouTube channel. So check them out. You can also hit the bell.
You'll be notified when those videos are released, because as I've mentioned, dozens of times before,
they're not always released exactly by 10:00 AM on Tuesday. Sometimes I get a little bit behind,
but that said, appreciate your hanging in. You can also comment below with any strategies
you've used that have worked really well for building up your own self-managed sales team.
The strategy that you'll want to introduce here to build out your self managed sales team is what I
call collaborative performance criteria CPC. Now, why is that important? Because what often happens
is the criteria for sales are set by management. So the number of calls you make, the number of
proposals, you write the number of proposals you close, right? Those are the common criteria,
but here's the thing, as we mentioned before, you and I both know that different sales professionals
have different strengths and weaknesses, different sales professionals deal in different territories.
And therefore, sometimes there's some uniqueness about the measures or metrics that they should or
can be using. What you want to do is have the sales team themselves identify the criteria by
which they should be measured. How do you do that? Well, you say to them, look, I've got
some basic criteria here that I would like to make sure we measure as a sales organization.
I want you to have a look at this, identify anything else you would add that you think is
important and any changes you would make now, why are we doing this? Well, first off, we're
creating an environment where we've got the team working collaboratively to come to a conclusion.
So that's going to help build this self-managed aspect. We're getting the team to engage
and make decisions on their own. That's what self-managed is all about. But most importantly,
we're getting the team to create the measures by which we're going to measure their performance.
So it makes it very difficult to receive pushback. If somebody is not meeting the criteria because
Hey, after all it's their criteria, right? So use this to create these collaborative performance
criteria and have the team come up with these building on which you provide them. And you've
got to be open to this. If they bring you back some changes and they've got some reasoning,
you're going to be open to making those changes. But nonetheless,
if you do this, it's going to start to build that environment. And most importantly set you up for
success when it comes to having performance conversations and people reporting on metrics
relative to how they're doing in their sales each and every week, day, and month. All right,
the last tip I want to share with you to build out your self managed sales team is
routine communication. Now I've referred to this in a couple earlier points, but here's the key.
I work with a business owner many years ago, he had a few people in sales. So it wasn't a large
business by any shape imagination. But what happened is, you know, one of them worked from
home. One of them worked in another territory. So they're also working from home and one worked
in the office and then the owner themselves did some selling. But I found a lot of times there was
such a lack of communication as to who's doing what and where things are at. So I said, look,
every day, jump on a zoom meeting or teams, whatever it is at set, the time 9:00 AM,
everybody gets on. I just want you to walk through what are the priorities that
you're working on for the organization. And then just go round the room. Everybody
share where the challenges I'm facing and what am I going to be working on today?
And this week, that's all you do. It should take no more than 15 minutes.
And he moaned and groaned. It didn't want to do it. And the employees didn't want to do it,
but you know what? They started to do it. But a year later I ran into him at an event and he
came up to me. He says, Sean, you know, I got to say that idea about meeting daily. It was
the best idea of everything you've shared with me. This is the best idea ever. So what I want
you to consider is you need to get your sales team talking daily. Now I know, depending on
how far across the, that your salespeople are spread and the time zones are in, that can be
a challenge, but you need them to be speaking briefly every day. And the format is simple,
right? As the leader, you can share kind of some important information,
keep it brief no more than five minutes for you in this conversation.
And then you go around the team and you don't just say, who has something you literally go
around and you say, okay, Sean, anything to share today? What are you working on? What are you
struggling with? Right, Todd, what are you working on? What are you struggling with? Bob? Same thing.
You call everybody out and everybody gets a chance to speak. Now, if you've got a huge team,
you might split this into two or three different meetings. But the key is you've
got everybody discussing everyday. What they're working on that creates awareness in the team,
but it also creates opportunities. Because if I say, I'm going to go Q C customer X today,
or have virtual conversation with customer X. It's a chance for somebody else say, oh,
you know what? I just did something great the other day, virtual, let me share it with you.
Or I've talked to that customer before, let me join you in that meeting. Right? So it creates
this environment of transparency. And the goal here is to get the team, to start to run
this meeting themselves. So you might start as a leader participating. I don't want you to go from
participating daily to backing them participating once a week. Okay? And you let the team run this
and don't let them off the hook. This will build the communication and the collaboration.
And ultimately is the key to ensuring that you've got a self-managed sales team in place.
Now, if you're building your team, but your team themselves are trying to master other skills to be
more effective in sales, make sure you visit this video next, where I cover off some key skills that
your team and the members within it obviously will need to master in order to be successful.
In sales. I've also included a link below to how to build a self-managed sales team that takes
these strategies and builds them out and gives you more strategies around exactly how you can do this
and a roadmap and plan, but which to do so. So make sure you grab that resource in the link below
last but not least. Make sure you comment with any questions below. I'll make sure I get back
to you. I do get notified when people post questions, but also make sure you add to this.
If you've built a high performing sales team, what other strategies are you using? I want to
make this a community. That's helpful to also add those comments below and until next time,
get on out there and let's sell something today. We'll talk to you again soon. Take care.