A culture of excellence doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a result of deliberate leadership that establishes clear goals paired with a motivating environment that supports every member of your team.
In this article, I want to specially focus on sales team culture.
For sales leaders, creating a culture of excellence is more than just doing what it takes to hit quotas, it’s about building a team that is deeply rooted in your agency’s mission, passionately committed to continuous growth and sets the bar higher with each success vs. waffling in each win.
Here are some ways you can begin to foster a culture of excellence for your insurance sales team.
Lead by Example
This is by far the most important!
Leadership drives culture and your insurance salespeople are most likely to emulate what you do rather than what you say. You are their leader, they have an expectation to learn from you, and you have duty to serve as their role model.
As the owner of your agency, nobody will ever work as hard as you, so you can’t expect that. However, you can show the behaviors and work ethic you expect from your team through your actions. If you want them to prioritize customer relationships, demonstrate it in your interactions.
If you want them to have a “never give up” mindset, then be the example so they can witness what that looks like in practice.
- Transparency: Leading by example is one of the easiest ways to show transparency. By default, you will share your own challenges and they will watch you overcome them. This is one of the easiest ways to humanize yourself to your team and begin building strong trust.
- Celebrate and Recognize: Sales people are competitive by nature. Recognize your agents who are defining examples of how to execute the activity and behaviors that drive top performance. People want to be surrounded by successful people, and if you’re not celebrating their success, who will they ever look up to?
When you embody excellence and set the standard, it becomes a natural expectation for the entire team.
Define Your Standard of Excellence
Excellence begins with clarity of course.
If your team doesn’t know what excellence looks like, they won’t know how to achieve it. This goes hand-in-hand with leading by example, it all starts with you.
Establish and Communicate Clear Goals
Define what your team’s success looks like, whether it’s hitting a stretch sales goal, restructuring profit margin on new business, or increasing cross-sell ratios. Whatever it is, clearly communicate and communicate it often. Our company is on a mission to enroll 300,000 customers by the end of 2025 and every single person on our team is acutely aware that every action we take and decision made rests on our ability to stay focused on hitting 300,000 sales.
Create Behavioral Standards
You’ll never get results without establishing the activity and standard of excellence required. My good friend and mental performance coach, Ben Newman, always says, “You can tell me how great you want to be, but words only last so long. Let me have a conversation with your daily action and we’ll see how bad you really want it.” Activity drives results, you need to establish the standard of effort required by your team and show them how it fits into your goals.
Communicate the Vision
Your team needs to understand their “why”. It’s no different than using logical and emotional certainty in a sales process to maximize your closing. If you want your sales team to go all in with you, you need to provide them the information to clearly understand how the activity your asking them to execute on works in relation to hitting your goal. You have to do this so they can emotionally connect to their ability to contribute and reap the associated rewards.
You must set this tone immediately to ensure everyone knows what’s expected.
Deploy Accountability at Scale
We say it all the time around here at the SMA office.
Accountability breeds, trust, team and toughness.
Excellence is built on trust, and trust is built on accountability. Your sales team needs to trust that everyone is contributing to shared goals and living up to expectations. There is nothing worse than allowing your team to witness a leader’s lack of accountability, especially if they preach living up to the company’s standard of excellence.
Hold Everyone Accountable
From top performers to new hires to yourself and your leadership team, everyone needs to be held to the same standard. This will result in tough conversations, but overtime the team will realize the these tough conversations are coming from a positive place, not negative. This is one of the hardest parts of building a strong sales culture and when done right, it will create the “take personal responsibility and keep moving ahead” mentality.
Focus on Solutions
When mistakes happen, you don’t have to play the blame game when your team is hard wired to operating within the standard of excellence. Mistake will happen, they know it, and they will be mentally prepared for you, their leader to debrief the situation and lead by example, which is working towards a solution.
This will take time, but accountability will result in everyone earning mutual respect and ensures the entire team is working in a truly supportive environment.
Conclusion
Excellence will always be an open road trip with no ending destination.
Building a sales culture of excellence is an all the time thing and it doesn’t happen over night.
However, by defining clear expectations, leading by example, and doubling down on accountability, you will inspire your team to exceed their own expectations and begin really making a positive impact on your agency’s sales growth.
