Creating a High Performance Sales Culture

A High Performance Sales Culture Matters

“Thank you for a unique and great approach to building a high performance sales culture. The facilitator was brilliant. It will help us to create even higher sales performance now that we all know what matters most.

It really opened our eyes about a different way to lead.”
Simon Jefferson | Managing Director | AKQA

“The high performance sales culture approach combined with the sales strategy and executive sales coaching work helped us to grow revenue by 48%, increase profits by 10%, and close more than 50% of our deals over the last 12 months.

Aligning our sales strategy, culture, and talent is making all the difference. Thank you LSA!”
Laurie Sewell | President & CEO | Servicon Systems

Given your unique sales strategy and competition, how can you get the most out of your sales force in a way that makes sense for your business and for your sales team?

According to the McKinsey Quarterly, a top quartile performing salesperson is 14 times more productive than an average performer.

Unfortunately, many still mistake sales culture as soft or abstract. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our organizational alignment research found that sales culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing sales teams in terms of:

Revenue growth and profitability
Sales leadership effectiveness and sales team engagement
Customer satisfaction and loyalty

We define sales culture as how and why things truly get done in an organization to attract, win, and serve target clients.

The good news is that sales culture can be measured and shaped by understanding the way people think, behave, and work. The bad news is that if your sales culture is unhealthy or misaligned with your people or business strategies, you will not perform at your peak. Experienced sales leaders know that their sales strategy must go through sales culture to be successfully implemented.

Sales culture exists by design or by default. Regardless of origin, strong sales cultures can help leaders perform, or strong sales cultures can hurt performance. With so many options for sales leaders who want to improve the performance of their sales teams, it is not surprising that so many get lost in and frustrated by impractical theories and expensive consultants trying to make sense of it all.

Our clients tell us that our research-backed, practical, and action-oriented approach to assessing and aligning sales culture provides clarity, structure, and measurable results for leaders who want to significantly lift sales performance.

Typically clients turn to High Performance Sales Culture Assessment, Consulting, and Training to:

Ensure that their sales culture is healthy enough to raise, clarify, and align sales performance expectations
Remove cultural barriers that are hindering sales strategy execution
Design a sales culture that aligns with their business and talent strategies
Identify how sales leaders can reach aggressive targets without creating resentment or disengagement
Increase accountability for sales improvement
Motivate their sales teams to perform at their peak

Once your sales strategy is clear enough to act, our approach typically involves four main steps customized to each unique situation:

1. Assess Your Current Sales Culture
Assessing your current culture allows sales leaders to accurately pinpoint strengths to leverage and weaknesses to address regarding how and why work currently gets done. Typical outcomes include identifying:

Levels of sales health
Strengths and weaknesses of the current sales culture
Areas of cultural alignment and misalignment vis-à-vis your sales strategy
Likely accelerators and inhibitors to sales performance
Benchmark comparisons

2. Identify the Key Cultural Actions to Improve Sales Performance
Review the assessment results and agree on the critical few cultural actions required to create a healthy, high performing, and aligned sales culture.

3. Execute the Key Cultural Actions
Implement the top cultural shifts in a way that makes sense for your sales strategy and unique marketplace circumstances.

4. Measure Improvement and Agree Upon Next Steps
Monitor progress and continuously improve.

If you would like to learn how building a high performance sales culture at work has helped leading sales organizations perform at their peak, please contact us.

Related Information

We recently hired LSA Global to help take our sales team to the next level. Specifically we focused on targeting the ideal client, differentiating our solutions, getting more qualified leads, and closing a higher percentage of our pipeline through a proven referral selling methodology.

So far, the results from the business sales training have been great. We were pleasantly surprised with the results-oriented approach and thoughtful follow-through plan to ensure that the new sales practices “stick.”

We look forward to a long-term relationship, and I would recommend LSA to anyone looking to increase the effectiveness of their sales force.

Patrick Arnold
President

LSA Global’s sales negotiation training and assessment process provided the sales negotiation tools and practices that have significantly enhanced our negotiations process. Their facilitators understood our business, its challenges, and framed the learning in a way that we understood.

I am very happy with the value we have received and would highly recommend LSA to others looking to improve their sales negotiations results.

Jeff Bizzack
President

We originally engaged with LSA Global to help our subcontract administrators and buyers develop better negotiations skills. As manufacturers of satellites, we have many sole source companies to procure the required parts.

Our teams must be able to interact effectively with international companies. This environment uniquely challenges our team in their ability to create equitable contracts, while preserving and strengthening our supplier relationships.

LSA Global not only provided our team with the skills to negotiate effectively and consistently, but we further expanded our relationship to include consulting around our negotiations’ process, measurement of our negotiations, and one-on-one coaching for our team members. We are very pleased with the result of our partnership with LSA Global.

Vivian Mackintosh
Vice President of Materiel

At the onset of our engagement with LSA, I was skeptical that an outside firm would be able to understand and dissect our organization’s highly complex and technical business challenges.

However, through the leadership team interview and strategy retreat processes that LSA utilized, they provided a fresh, innovative, and practical perspective that created tremendous strategic value and focus for our executive leadership team.

As a result, I would highly recommend LSA Global to any leader struggling with building the strategic alignment and high performance teams necessary to generate sales growth, in a way that fits their unique corporate culture.

Robert Laudati
Managing Director

We selected LSA over a handful of other experts to assist with a key sales leadership imperative. LSA added value every step of the way throughout the entire engagement. Their customized approach to sales presentation training exceeded expectations, and we are excited about global implementation across our offices in more than 100 countries.

LSA’s unique Strategy-to-Results approach is an added game changer. I recommend them to anyone looking to get high quality results when it matters most.

Eric Mugele
Executive Director Global Learning

We hired LSA to help align our sales strategy with our business strategy to sustain our hardware business while driving high growth in software and services. LSA’s ability to measure our level of strategic alignment, pinpoint areas of leverage, and get the entire executive sales team to agree upon what matters most exceeded our expectations.

I would recommend them to any sales leader who wants to drive sales performance.

Dan Dica
SVP Worldwide Sales

Seagate has always found LSA to be a highly valuable consulting, training, and coaching resource.

The recent business sales training programs they’ve delivered for Seagate University have been the right solution, of highest of quality, and highly customized to our unique business and culture.

I would highly recommend LSA to any company interested in offering top notch learning solutions that make a difference.

Tammy Dujmovich
Sales, Marketing & Customer Service

We partnered with LSA to help custom design, deliver, and measure an advanced new employee on-boarding process. It was well thought out and bought into by sales leadership. The combination of targeted sales tools, technology, coaching, performance plans, training, and reinforcement made all the difference. The solution quantifiably improved new employee and hiring manager satisfaction and increased the speed to sales quota for new hires.

I would highly recommend LSA Global for any sales enablement team looking to increase the engagement and speed to productivity of their sales force. We are excited to implement the program globally as we continue to scale.

Rochana Golani
Director, Global Sales & Technical Field Enablement

We value the relationship we have with LSA Global. They customize and deliver top quality sales solutions when we needed them. They pay special attention to ensuring the solution fits our unique needs, business, and culture.

I would recommend them to anyone looking to greatly improve the skills of their sales force.

Carol M. Harbin
Manager, Worldwide Sales L&D

We turned to LSA Global to help us take our executive selling and solution selling skills to the next level.

Their ability to formally assess our sales situation, identify key sales skill gaps, develop a plan to measure the results, and fully implement a key sales initiative has been outstanding.

LSA delivers the full solution; not just sales training. I recommend them to any organization looking to transform its sales force the “right way” to sell higher and wider.

Daniel Heckman
Director of Sales-Enterprise Accounts

LSA Global demonstrated excellent expertise in sales and sales leadership, spent the time required to make sure the objectives were clear, and showed flexibility in shaping and sustaining everything that they did.

They “MEDRADized” the session to meet our unique needs, looked beyond the obvious, and got the key points across in a way that made sense. Thank you!

Doug Stantial
North America Sales Training Manager

LSA always delivers the right sales and sales management solutions to meet our unique needs. I especially appreciate their ability to deeply understand our business and our culture so that they can design the most valuable and impactful outcomes for us and our clients.

Sarah Parks
Senior Project Manager

ServiceSource has relied on LSA Global’s expertise for a variety of core initiatives, from strategy design and implementation, to business sales skills, to sales coaching. We recently engaged LSA Global to create a competency matrix for our inside sales team that will serve as our roadmap for employee on-boarding, development, succession planning, and retention.

This critical project had a tight timeline with high visibility. LSA Global completed the deliverable ahead of schedule and surpassed our expectations.

PMO and Outside Sales Operations
Senior Vice President

From beginning to end, LSA was as invested in making sure the program succeeded as we were. They not only met the needs of our sales organization, but they helped us meet our very tight launch deadline.

The consultant operated with the sense of urgency necessary to ensure that we were ready to roll the business sales training program in a way that made sense.

Without their dedication and sales expertise we would not have been able to launch the program with the success that we did. Thank you LSA for being a valued business partner!

Erin Surprise
PHR, Manager - L & D

LSA is a great and high quality training and consulting resource. In less than a week turnaround time, they were able to design and deliver a ‘best in class’ inside sales solution to meet my team’s unique needs.

They definitely met my high expectations and were very responsive to my specific objectives. Thank you!

Olivia Flach
Americas Retail Sales