Most sales managers that I have interacted with have been frustrated with some (and maybe all) of their salespeople. It can be for several reasons but the one I have found is the most common is ownership.

The Importance of Ownership

Ownership of the sales interaction.

Ownership of the prospect’s journey, until it is complete. And nothing short of a closed deal is acceptable.

Unless you/they have done everything to get over every hurdle that comes up, the sales process isn’t over.

I know that the salespeople who were successful in a way that led to their sales leadership role owned everything they could during the prospect’s sales experience journey.

Some will call it persistence, grit, determination. I call it extreme ownership. It’s the do-whatever-it takes mindset that I write about in the blog for sales professionals (LINK).

If that was your mode, then it can really tough to watch any of your team members do anything less than whatever it takes.

Getting Your Team to Take Ownership

So how do you get them to own their role as a sales professional, where anything other than successfully helping a prospective customer who has a need or goal that you could help them achieve with your product/service, is failure?

The first step is to get them to read the article [LINK] to help them understand the mindset.

Then, you need to help them connect with the most, negative, terrible outcome for your prospects in general if they don’t buy from them.

Will they lose money in their business? Could that lead to going out of business? Could that lead to financial ruin, which is the most common reason for divorce? Could they lose everything? Could it lead to stress, health issues, maybe a heart attack?

Could it lead to long term health issues or financial struggles (either of which you could have helped resolve)? Could this lead to some of the items from above?

I am not trying to be dramatic, but most of the time the outcome of someone who needs your help, but doesn’t get it, is bad. Really bad.

Third, you need to help, coach, and support each of your team to do more Discovery. To ask deeper, better questions. They need to dive deeper into understanding the what AND the why with every prospect. They need to ask questions like ‘what have you tried so far?’ and ‘if I can’t help you, for some reason, what other options do you have to help with _______?’.

It’s important to know both the overall, general worst-case-outcome for your prospects, but also the specific situations for every person they speak with.

Overcoming Sales Complacency

What I see, unfortunately, is that salespeople think ‘of course everyone wants ______’ and even ‘the product sells itself.’ They lump all the people they speak with together into the same reasons that other people have bought – back when they cared enough to do a good empathetic, discovery session with each prospect.

The reason these three steps are so important is that you can’t truly help push a prospect past their barriers and help them embrace the risks of the unknown – which is what buying something new requires.

Objections, questions, and concerns that come up are just a result of fear being greater than trust.

A sales professional understands this and knows that their mission isn’t over until that prospect becomes a customer and then after that – they stay a customer.

Once you have helped cement the Ownership mindset with the team, then comes the action steps of constantly reinforcing – on a deal-by-deal level. If you have a sales pipeline of prospects that you can review with your team, do it.

Group Pipeline Review Meetings

Tip – if your team is really struggling with extreme ownership of each sales process, do the pipeline review meetings as a group. This will keep them from trying to hide from the group. They will feel more accountable if they are in a group with their peers.

The second reason to have group pipeline solutioning meetings is for everyone to learn from each other. To hear objections and challenges, to have a perspective of lots of scenarios, and then hear about the solutions that others are coming up and leverage to move sales forward.

That will help take a lot of the pressure and focus off you – as the all-knowing, all-experienced leader who helps them solve their problems so they can close more deals. What you need is for them to develop the skills and mindset to learn how to solve the obstacles that come up. And it’s not that you don’t want to help them, but you have to teach them how to fish on their own, or they will starve to death.

Conclusion

Your role as a leader is to help your team with the mindset (which is what we have discussed so far) and the tactics/tools.

Help them own the relationship with each prospect – fully, deeply and all the way to the finish line. When you empower them to have the mindset that sales = service, and they owe it to each prospect, then they will own it in a way that leverages Authentic Persuasion.