Is Your Sales Team Engaged Enough to Sell Solutions?

Sales Force Engagement
Sales leaders are noticing a troubling drop in energy and ownership across their sales teams. As the growth engine and face of an organization, companies cannot afford to have a disengaged sales force. On average, a 10% drop in engagement equates to a 4% drop in sales productivity. The question for sales leaders: Is your sales team engaged enough to sell solutions rather than products?

Our training measurement research points to a clear differentiator impacted by sales force engagement: sales conviction. Sales reps who demonstrated high levels of belief in the solution, the customer impact, and their own credibility outperformed their peers by 12.2%. That gap isn’t about effort alone — it’s about:

• Sales Mindset.
• Sales Confidence.
• Sales commitment to solving real customer problems.

When sales team engagement is high, sales conversations change. Sales reps lead with insight, challenge customer thinking, and create value that goes beyond price. When it’s low, they default to discussing features, doing demos, and offering discounts: all transactional sales behaviors that erode margins and trusted advisor status.

The Challenge: It Is Harder To Sell
In nearly every complex solution-selling workshop we deliver, sales teams tell the same story: winning business has become materially harder — both inside their organization and against their competition. That isn’t sales rep assessment pessimism; it’s a reality that sales team must overcome.  From the perspective of buyers, complex and high stakes purchases create:

• Higher Decision Risk
  Multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, and unclear trade-offs raise the chance of buyer’s making the “wrong” choice.
• Higher Execution Risk
  Complex solutions typically require some degree of change (e.g., new behaviors, processes, and mindsets) to deliver value.  If implementation, adoption, or integration breaks down, the deal can be seen as a failure.
• Higher Career Risk
  For senior buyers, a failed complex purchase can damage credibility, reputation, or career advancement prospects.

The Impact: Buyers Need More Help
As a result, many buyers delay decisions, demand more proof, seek consensus, and involve procurement and finance earlier. This isn’t indecision — it’s risk management.  For sales teams, this means success is no longer about pushing urgency. It’s about reducing perceived risk. The most effective sellers help buyers:

• Clarify trade-offs
• Align stakeholders
• Anticipate implementation challenges
• Make the decision feel safer than doing nothing

Unfortunately, Sales Teams Are More Disengaged Than Most
Strong sales engagement is the exception, not the norm. Our employee engagement research consistently shows that sales forces trail nearly every other organizational function in three key engagement drivers: advocacy, discretionary effort, and intent to stay.

Project postmortem data reveals that the reasons are most often structural, not motivational. High-performing solution sellers tend to hold exceptionally high expectations — of their leaders, their organizations, and the systems meant to support them. When the sales strategy is unclear, sales priorities shift, or sales tools and processes get in the way of winning deals, sales force disengagement follows quickly.

In short, sales teams disengage not because they lack drive, but because too their sales environment makes it harder — not easier — to help clients to succeed.

Is Your Sales Team Engaged Enough to Sell Solutions?: 3 Steps to Improve Salesforce Engagement

Sales leaders and managers cannot afford to disregard employee engagement as an “HR Thing.” Sales force disengagement is a revenue growth, sales productivity, and customer satisfaction thing. If you are concerned about sales engagement and performance, here are three steps we recommend you take:

1. Revisit Your Sales Strategy
   It is difficult to consistently meet sales targets without a clear and meaningful direction. Yet many sales teams are moving too quickly to create and clearly articulate the basics of a solid sales strategy other than quarterly revenue targets.  Some sales leaders say they do not have the time; others think aggressive sales targets combined with increased sales pressure and hard work should be enough.Our organizational alignment research found that effective go-to-market sales strategies clearly and compellingly outline four areas that should lead to superior sales performance:
   • Your ideal target clients where you should win the majority of the time.
   • Your unique value proposition that sets you apart from the pack.
   • How you will measure and reward sales success and failure.
   • The specific sales goals, roles, processes, and actions required for success.

You will know you are on the right path when your sales team thinks that your sales strategy is clear enough, believable enough, and implementable enough to move forward.

RELATED: Benchmark Your Sales Strategy to See Where You Stand

2. Revisit Your Sales Culture
   Once your sales strategy is clear and aligned enough, it is time to examine your sales culture — how sales related things truly get done on a daily basis. We believe that it is a sales leader’s responsibility to create the circumstances that stimulate improved performance from their sales force.  So how does a sales leader create a sales culture that significantly improves revenue, margin, win-rate, deal size, etc.?

   To create a high performance sales culture, make sure that every sales-related process and customer-facing person is aligned in terms of customer intimacy, market approach, risk tolerance, information sharing, and decision-making.  Then make sure that the following high performance sales components make sense for your strategy and the plan to make it happen:

   • Sales Performance Measurement
     The way sales performance is measured must be clear, understood, credible, relevant, accurate, consistent, timely, transparent, fair, and trusted at the organizational, team, and individual levels.
   • Sales Rewards, Recognition, and Consequences
     Each and every motivational component of your rewards program should have direct cause and effect relationships, be timely, be perceived as fair, be proportionate and consistent, be known in advance, and be linked to a meaningful reason to stay and perform.

     That also means identifying and rewarding top sales performers and identifying and taking compassionate action with under performers.

   • Sales Approach
     Your sales team structures, processes, business practices, and technologies should make things better, faster, and cheaper for your clients, not be a hindrance to helping them, or your sales force, to succeed.
3. Revisit Your Sales Talent
   Once your sales culture is aligned with your sales strategy, it is time to attract, develop, engage, and retain the top sales talent to execute your sales strategy by:
   • Defining and Attracting Top Sales Talent
     Identify what constitutes a high performing sales rep and never settle for less. Always look for high performers who fit your sales culture and strategy. They are worth the wait.
   • Develop Top Sales Talent
     Make sure that you identify and quantify the top few sales scenarios that matter most for your unique value proposition and sales strategy along with the critical few sales skills, behaviors and attitudes most correlated to client success. Then use sales simulation assessments, experiential-based business sales training, targeted sales performance coaching, and training measurement to drive sales performance.
   • Engage and Retain Top Sales Talent
     Is your sales team engaged enough?  To find out, consistently measure the levels of sales team advocacy, discretionary effort, and intent to stay.  Then visibly take the steps necessary to become a highly engaged sales force.

If you liked reading Is Your Sales Team Engaged Enough to Sell Solutions?, download How to Optimize Your Sales Force in the Face of Increased Performance Pressure 

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.