Transparency: The Secret Ingredient to a High-Performing Sales Team
Full transparency is a way to unlock the collective intelligence of your team.
What if every sales rep knew where they stood every day relative to their expectations around both results and activities? Now, what if they also knew where everyone else on the team stood? To some, this seems scary.
When you think of cultivating a great “sales team culture,” you may think of happy hours, awards banquets, incentive trips, and so on. It’s true that offering these types of perks is great for maintaining morale among your team, but I would argue that the most valuable element leaders can bring to their team is transparency.
Typically, when we think about transparency, our minds immediately turn to revenue projections, new product launches or service offerings, and quarterly sales initiatives. These are all great, but it shouldn’t stop there. In fact, one survey showed that management transparency was the top factor in determining employees’ happiness.
On our sales team, every salesperson has full visibility of the success and overall performance of their teammates. Full transparency? It sounds crazy, and it might even make you uneasy. First instinct says this would foster a hyper-competitive environment. Yet, I’ve watched a special culture emerge from this relatively simple business decision; the team is more collaborative and helpful than ever before. When they see someone struggling, they dive in to help.
Transparency about team members’ performance and progress toward their goals is where the magic lies.
In order to really make this work, I followed a few simple rules:
Set clear expectations (this is not just what revenue expectations you have - i.e. quota, etc.…).
Be consistent about these expectations.
Follow through (hardest and probably most important).
Be transparent about your own successes and failures and set an example for your team. People won’t buy in unless you practice what you preach.
Although people like the idea of transparency, sometimes they don’t love it when it highlights their mistakes. I faced this several times when making performance across the team visible to everyone; it’s not exactly comfortable. You have to build trust and create an environment where there is no shame in having a bad month or an off week. (This doesn’t mean it’s OK to ignore poor performance and the underlying causes — you can read my article on performance management for a deeper dive.)
Trust is a critical component of transparency.
Without trust, you can completely damage what you’re trying to achieve and scare employees away from actually speaking out when they want to. That’s why it’s important for leaders to focus on building trust within their teams.
From my own experience, when you build a high level of trust and combine that with a high level of transparency it can be truly transformative for your people and the results they get!