At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), our mission and reason for being is to Turn Talent into Performance. Talent is foundational, but it’s not the only element.
It starts with talent, but you must also develop. After you’ve selected the person, you must commit to growing and developing them if you really want to turn talent into performance.
How do you grow someone?
Tools and Tactics for Growing and Developing Your People
Sales leaders that work with CSS, and use the Growth Guide, know first-hand that this is a tool that helps you get to know your team, including what they like, what they don't like, and the best ways to manage them.
The Growth Guide made a huge impact because it taught us how to effectively communicate, understand, and motivate our employees. We learned that instead of treating others how we would like to be treated, we need to treat them how they would like to be treated.
The Growth Guide is simply 18 questions (already laid out for you) that focus solely on getting to know your salespeople. This is one of our top downloads in our resource center — and for good reasoning. But if you’re not a CSS client, there are similar tools and tactics to help grow and develop your people.
Start by sitting down with your salespeople and asking 15-20 questions related to these categories:
- How do they learn?
- How are they motivated?
- What are their preferences and non-preferences?
- What are their goals and what do they want to achieve?
An example of a question you would want to ask is: If you were managing you — what are three things you would be sure to do in order to grow and develop you? What are three things you would be sure not to do?
This starts a good conversation about things that they like and don’t like. Every person is different, and this is why you need to spend some time asking these questions and getting to know your salespeople. When you get to know your people, you'll learn ways to best manage each individual, and when you know how to best manage them, this is very motivating and helps performance.
One important factor that many sales leaders forget is to update your version of the Growth Guide every single year with person you’re working with to get a better understanding of their innate talents but also to see how they they’re growing and developing.
As you're looking for ways to get the most out of your sales team, use this concept of the Growth Guide to help grow and develop your people.
