Creating a Sales (and Service) Culture

With competition increasing, it is all the more important for businesses to be able to transition their people from having a pure service focus, to adopting a sales and service mindset.  Having worked with clients in the credit union and superannuation industry for many years, where ‘member service’ has always been the key underlying principle of operation, the challenge has always been getting staff to see that they are ultimately the same thing – you cannot truly provide quality service if you’re not exploring and then fulfilling the potential needs of your customers. 

So what makes this transition so difficult and why is there so much resistance to ‘sales’? 

There are many reasons why businesses fail in being able to create an effective sales culture.

• Businesses are often not clear on what creating an effective sales culture actually means and how this translates to the roles people play within the business.  At Neural Networks Concepts (NNC) we have found that organisations not only need to have clarity around their overall strategy, but have the mechanisms in place to bring this to life and support it back in the business e.g. accurate role descriptions, Key Result Areas (KRAs), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), performance management systems, etc.  Without this, performance is difficult to measure, people cannot be held accountable and focus often gets lost.
• Another important factor in creating a sales culture is having the people within the business be able to personally connect to its vision.  If staff have a perception of sales as ‘pushy’ or ‘manipulative’ then they are simply not going to do it.  By reframing what ‘sales’ means for them and aligning the role to their personal values and beliefs, staff are much more likely to spend the time ‘servicing’ their customers in a way that also ultimately promotes the products and services of the business.

It is only with these things in place that we recommend providing staff with the tools and techniques to help them effectively sell in this way.  Without a clear strategic intention, accurate role perception and motivation to ‘sell’, businesses just waste money launching straight into providing sales training programs.  To achieve long lasting cultural change, organisations must have everything else in place first.

To find out more about how NNC can assist your business in successfully creating a sales culture,  give us a call on (03) 9555 7955 or email us.