June 9, 2025

How To Build A More Fantastic Sales Organization

How To Build A More Fantastic Sales Organization

An audacious and unmatched Sales Team is not created on the backs of sales tactics or techniques.
It’s not developed by being “the best” practitioner of sales principles espoused by the textbooks on the subject.

Unique Sales Teams who are The ONLY Ones who do what they do are grown out of Context and Culture.

Context — the overall organization has a strategy that declares customer loyalty as the key strategic imperative for growth.

Leadership in THIS organization believes that long term growth is achievable only by nurturing their loyal base of customers; they place a lower emphasis on acquiring new customers to fuel their growth activities.

Culture — the culture of the organization is an expression of customer obsession, memorable serving experiences and long term relationships.

The Value System in these companies honors serving others as the behavior necessary to build long term customer relationships and long term growth.

Sales should be looked upon as being in the SERVING game not the product pushing game.

If you are looking to take your Sales Team to a higher level and you DON’T have Context and Culture solidly in place, you will be forced to improve sales efficiency rather than strategic effectiveness.

And the result will be unimpressive.

You will look like every other salesforce who covets the same sales “best practices” with the expectation that somehow you will achieve miraculous results.

Insanity = Doing what everyone else is doing and expecting breathtaking results.

With Context and Culture in play, here are my top 3 priorities to establish a mind-blowing Sales Team:

#1. Recruitment — a customer-obsessed serving culture requires employees who “love humans”.

You can teach people sales techniques, but you can’t teach them how to love people!
You must recruit individuals who have a natural innate desire to SERVE others.

I created the “Hiring for Goosebumps” method to identify potential employees with “I love humans” in their DNA.
It worked unbelievably well even though some thought it was a crazy process. Whatever. It helped us to A BILLION IN SALES.

#2. Performance Planning — Serving expectations must be clearly defined in each salesperson’s annual Performance Plan.

And they must be relentlessly measured.

Expectations in the serving realm typically are behavior-based. They relate to human traits like: keeping promises, availability, follow-up, attitude, fixing mistakes, responsiveness, problem solving approach, listening and respect.

The challenge is to define the traits that are important to your target customers, set objectives for each of them and measure the sales person’s performance on each of them regularly via customer perception surveys on a simple scale like “Poor, Fair, Average, Good, Excellent”.

These serving objectives should be as robust as the product sales targets that will also be in the sales performance plan.

#3. Compensation — The old adage ”People do what they’re paid to do.” is particularly true of salespeople who, in my experience, are more relentlessly driven by their compensation plan than most other employees.

If you don’t get their bonus compensation plan “right”—defined as being 100% aligned with the strategy of the organization—dysfunction sets in and desired results will elude you.

SERVING targets based on the desired behaviors expected must be set and paid for in the sales compensation plan.
And they must be given a strong enough weight in relation to other targets (like product sales) to capture their attention and act accordingly.

The compensation plan might look something like this in year 1: 30% of the bonus would be paid out on SERVING performance; 70% on product sales. In subsequent years of the plan, you want to increase the weight for the SERVING component at the expense of the product sales component.

Taking sales performance to a higher level isn’t about sales tools.
It’s about context & culture followed by recruitment, performance planning and the bonus compensation plan.

If you don’t get this formula right, you’ll get micro efficiency gains perhaps, but you won’t get any movement in the strategic effectiveness dial.

Cheers,
Roy
My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION shares the specific Moves I made to achieve jaw-dropping growth in an insanely competitive internet business.

”The Audacious Unheard of Ways I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES” is the latest in my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

• Posted 6.9.25 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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