Transcript
Intro
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teamsā¦teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real-world and practical advice to help you develop super-powered B2B sales teams. Celebrations. When to celebrate, how to celebrate who we should be celebrating forā¦these are all questions that come up so often when I'm working with sales leaders. Can I standardise it or do I need to stay really loose and open? What's the best ways that I can engage my team when I'm celebrating? Is there a format as to what I'm doing? I cannot count the number of times that I've been asked by sales leaders to help them build a celebrations program that is repeatable and somewhat predictable. For me, I think it's something that is within everyone's grasp to be able to do really regularly. So today I thought, why don't we do a podcast around celebrations and how we can build some predictability and consistency in how we celebrate as a team.
Before I sat down to record this, I thought, why are celebrations important? And there was the really obvious around people feel good when they are celebrated. So, I went out and found some statistics that really talk around engagement levels post celebrations. And the numbers that I came up with across a number of different statistics was that about 70% of employees really do enjoy when they are celebrated by their managers or their leaders. And about 80% of these employees are willing to work harder when they have even more regular appreciation. Where I found those statistics, I'll put them into the show notes so that you know where to look if you'd like to verify them yourselves. But the message that I took out of a broad range of statistics that I found through my own research was that most people feel better when they're celebrated and most people will work harder when they're celebrated. So whether you agree with the exact number, the theme is really clear. Those that celebrate, appreciate it and work harder. So, for me, I think that's worth spending time on as sales leaders. We spend a lot of time around strategy and sales process and our metrics, training and coaching programs and firefighting and everything that goes with it. But I think that we all too often leave out the importance of celebrations and the rituals that go with them. So today we are going to focus on exactly that and I'm going to provide a few themes, processes or amount of rigour that you can consider using for your sales team.
So, it's just me today. Buckle in for a nice punchy session and let's start talking celebrations. I've always worked with teams around three types of celebrations for their teams. Number one, senior leadership level celebrations. Number two, internal team celebrations. And number three, external team celebrations. They kind of sound similar, but in fact have very different aims and levels of implementation that I think are worth, as a leader, clarifying between.
So let's talk first at a senior level, probably the hardest ones to build some rigour around because we need to have others outside of our team embracing the celebrations. But I think for me, the most important because celebrations that come from the very top of a business are those that are most impactful at an individual level. So, for this type of celebration, it's how do we engage leaders at a general management level, a CEO level, your broader C-suite at a board level, at a leadership team level, all depending on where you're at within your business. But how do we engage those leaders above us in the hierarchical structure of a business to help celebrate our team? These are actually quite easy to do when we have a leadership team that's on board with our celebrations.
So let's picture this for a moment. You have a new initiative that you're rolling out that we know is tied back to an increase in the profitability of the revenue of your team. So we're not just talking about growing sales, we're talking about an initiative that's going to help boost margins and then go directly to the bottom line. If we think about how that impacts the broader business goals, well, it's quite clear that's going to impact at an EBIT level and then hopefully down to a net profit level. Senior leaders of your business are going to be really engaged around that because they know that at the end of the day, if they're boosting net profit numbers, they're doing their jobs better and those above them or around them will see that they are doing their role in a more effective manner.
So, where we can engage our senior leaders across a celebration that is directly impacting one of their goalsā¦that's where we will get the buy in and then the corresponding celebrations. So we'll talk a little bit about how you celebrate and when you can celebrate a little bit later on. But really, for leadership celebrations and particularly senior leadership celebrations, it's all about making sure that they understand the celebration is directly linked to your team's performance, which is their team's performance, and then the broader business performance. I certainly recommend that we are spending time with our leaders during one-on-ones and our catch-ups, explaining to them the importance of these initiatives and their role in celebrations. But to make it really easy around celebrating at a senior leadership level, I encourage every leader that I work with to do the work for their leaders so they can have maximum impact with minimum time. So what do I mean by this? Well, this is all about sending your leaders the celebration for them, getting the gift going, writing the words going, giving them the format when they need to do it. So all they need to do is turn up and deliver. It's very common at a senior leadership level where they'll have their EAās or those around them do some of this work for them. And if they can deliver, it's nice and easy and comfortable. So for me, I see engaging celebrations across the broader business as a role that we can, as leaders, impact directly by doing the work for those around us. Of course, there's a really nice benefit that comes here around once we start to train our senior levels, that once we start to train those leaders above us, that they build their own rituals and consistent processes and actually naturally start to look for more ways to be celebrating your team.
So that's number one. I started with a really big punchy one to make sure everyone's listening right off the bat.
Number two, the easiest of celebrations is internally across your team. So this is all about ways that you as the leader simply celebrate with your team when things are done well. To really see success here, it's all about building habits and routines and rituals that we can roll through the day-to-day tasks that we do in our business that allow us to focus on celebrations. So, what do I mean here? Well, the classic one is to roll celebrations into your weekly team meetings. So, we have our team come in. One of your members has had a fantastic week where they have done something. Let's say in this instance, it's non-sales, numbers related, but more around engaging a large number of leads. And we've seen that their pipeline that we've measured from our weekly dashboard in our CRM. Go back to episode 15 by the way of this podcast if you'd like to see more around sales metrics. And we've then seen that they may have generated a terrific number of leads or new customer meetings over the last week or month or whatever the period may be, where we can be celebrating this at a consistent level internally with our team. It's also very powerful in driving engagement, teams that are happy and of course, as I said off the start, teams that are going to work harder. So that's, number two, the easiest one. It's all about celebrating at a team level that we generally drive.
Where this one gets really interesting is when our teams start to celebrate each other themselves. I love this because what we're doing is we're taking some of the responsibility away from you as a leader. We're seeing the team step up and celebrate each other, but we're also seeing the leaders within the team start to rise to the top. And the cream always rises to the top when you provide that environment that allows them to do it.
So number one, celebrating at a senior leadership level. We were talking all about how we can engage our leaders. Number two is celebrating at a team level, the easiest one where we can do ourselves and with our team. And the third, the one that is, I think, least common across sales and businesses in general, is how we celebrate cross-organisation. So, these are the type of celebrations where we won't just be in our weekly meetings with our team or with our executive level, but we will be celebrating across operations, marketing, customer care, legal, finance, people and culture, risk, regulatory, doesn't matter what the function is, but it's where we're building out a habit of celebrating across the business.
So why is this one so important? Well, it's a program that I run really regularly with my teams around building greater engagement across the business so that they can have buy-in to the initiatives that they're running. So, where this type of celebration is really successful is in particular when we are launching something new to the business or we're working through a particular initiative that significantly needs the support of other functions. So an example here might be where we are a sales team and we are launching a program that is all about customer engagement post sale. So, we could talk about referrals, we could talk about customers coming back to spend with us again, we could be talking about customers who are increasing their engagement with us in their current transaction. It doesn't matter what it looks like, but really around where we're trying to grow revenue outside of general customer acquisition. So for here, where we can engage functions across the business who we know have contact with our customers post sale, during delivery, or for whatever reason outside of the sales process, this is where we can have an impact that not only celebrates our team and makes our members, our team members feel really good, but, but it starts to involve functions outside of our teams to actually help in our core initiative that we're running. So if we think of customer referrals and we're really wanting to drive this post-initial sale, if we can be celebrating across our teams. So across our customer care team, when we have a customer that is referred by them, or when we have a customer referral program that is championed by the sales team, we can actually engage them to be talking more to customers when they're dealing with them at a referral level. The best example that I've seen with teams about celebrating cross-organisation is one that I often talk about using something that is a little bit nostalgic to celebrate with. So, what this often looks like is where we might use something like an old sweet or a lolly that we grew up with, something really common. It might be things like sherbet bombs or Bertie beetle chocolates or I used to say big boss cigars, but I don't think they're as appropriate these days. But even things like the gold coins that we used to get as kids, the ones with the gold foil wrapping that if we didn't eat them straight away, they'd melt because they'd had such thin chocolate in our hands and we had to peel them off from that foil. But those type of symbols that we can use that actually can relate at an emotional level to our teams, have a really big impact in the cross-functional celebrations. I'll use an example of a team I worked with recently. They were launching a program that was all around customer engagement. So how do they get customers engaging more regularly with their sales teams? What they did, the leader of this team did was they actually put gold coins all around the organisation. No explanation, nothing happening. They built a little bit of interest into what was going on. The second thing that they did was they then started to leak a little bit of information, and I love saying that word leak because it's like a PR campaign. They started to leak a little bit of that information out across their teams where it started to provide a little bit of insight into what the gold coins meant. From there, they sent a video out across the whole business. 1 minute talking to the teams around what the gold coins represented, and they then launched their initiative at the next all-business meeting. What happened, and was really powerful here, was that the gold coins were actually a way of celebrating across the team, outside of just their own team, by building that emotional connection. And of course, it related clearly back to profit of the business. But by building that emotional connection to things that people hadn't seen for a while, they had instant recognition around what the program was. So, whenever they were speaking about it post the launch, they had a greater level of engagement with their team because across the business functions understood what they were doing. We can call it living rent-free in people's minds. We can call it coming to the front of the queue when your brain's turned on, whatever you want to say. But by rolling out a program that's celebrated early through a connection that most people could resonate with, this leader was actually able to build some momentum around their program that was greater than the team themselves. And from there, the celebrations then became regular. Senior leaders got involved. First type of celebration. Their team got involved through cadence meetings, through the leader driving it, through the team driving it. But functions across the business also got involved because they had something that they could resonate and relate to. So, they're the three types of celebrations. Number one, exec leaders hardest, but when we get it right and we do the work for them, super impactful because of their role in the business. Number two was all about standard team celebrations, very much cadence driven, where we have to build some structure around it, but also where they can work really well when we get our teams involved. And number three was celebrating cross-functionally across the organisation to try and increase the impact of events or initiatives that you're running.
Okay, so three types of celebrations. What I'd love to talk about now is how we celebrate. And I like to use the four c's when I'm working with teams around how we celebrate. Yes, it's another level of alliteration, another three, four or five-step framework. But the reason I do these is because they're really easy to remember and powerful for us as leaders when we have so much on to be able to communicate effectively to our teams. So here are the four types of celebrations. We have cadence celebrations, we have cash celebrations, we have customised celebrations, and we have creative celebrations.
So, let's go through each of the four. Okay, so number one, cadence celebrations. These are pretty straightforward and ones we don't need to spend much time on. So, this is all about how we celebrate regularly through consistent patterns, like spoken during meetings, emails, videos, ways that we can actually be celebrating at a really regular levelā¦lots of small wins. The best places I like to see these done are during the four team meetings that I've spoken about through episode 24. And this is all around weekly sales meetings, one-to-ones training programs and dealer account reviews. So go back to episode 24 if you're uncertain as to how that might look. Cadence celebrations are fantastic because they regularly keep morale up. And we can do this through lots of just easy-to-implement ways as long as we have the systems and the symbols that remind us to do that. So, what I mean here is, a process where we have on agendas that we are celebrating really easy to do and I definitely would encourage you to do that, particularly in your sales meetings and your one-to-ones.
Number two, cash celebrations. So, these are celebrations that clearly are financial. And what I will say off the bat here is that only one in four of the ways we celebrate are around cash. And I think that's really important because if we're celebrating and it's expected that there is going to be a cash reward from it, then we end up building a team who are only going that little bit extra or acknowledging a celebration when there's cash involved. We don't want to do that, but they certainly have a role in how we celebrate as teams. So, cash celebrations can also form things like days off, because in the end they allow people to have more holidays, which means they have to use less of their holiday time and they bank that. They can also be things like gifts or vouchers or something that whilst strictly not monetary, it does allow them to not spend money in other ways.
Okay, so our third type of celebration are customised celebrations. These are the ones that I really like. They're not quite my favourite, but I'll call them my second favourite. But a customised celebration is when we will celebrate in a specific way that resonates most with the person that we're celebrating. So, if we have a sales team member that has three kids, all boys, really active, and we know that they love doing things as a family together. For me, a great celebration here is a certificate to a water park or some type of outdoor activity that they can do with their family. At the same time, if we have someone who loves fine dining, they enjoy going out with their partner, then we might be sending them to a great restaurant that they may not have been to previously. But where we know our team and we know what they enjoy as individuals, then we can start celebrating at a customised level. For me, these celebrations actually have a greater impact because we are ramping up the level of appreciation that we're going to receive from our team members.
So number one, all about cadence celebrations. Number two, cash celebrations. Number three is customising.
And number four, my favourite, is getting really creative. So creative celebrations are ones I love to see applied to a team. And they might be a sales goal where if we hit it, we are out to do something really special for the team, but something that also brings the team together. Or it might be a celebration that gets team members or individuals access to something that they normally wouldn't be able to do. So it might be time-driven where we're giving them access to learning, or where we're giving them when they're on holiday, access to something that they may not be able to do on their holidays. Or it may be something that we are doing at a group level that is giving them the chance to learn more. So, we're giving the team time off to go and learn more about something that's really impactful for the team. So where we can get really creative with celebrations, they get remembered. And when celebrations are remembered, particularly when they strike at an emotional level, they get talked about. And what happens is they build a story of their own. The gold coin example that I used through one of my current customers is actually working on that is talked about regularly through their team. And they celebrate in all types of different offshoots and ways that take that original form of celebration and actually start to do it a little bit differently. So not only have they built the initial creative celebration, but they're now building off it to extend it into more ways to celebrate the team. So there are the four types of celebrations. We have cadence celebrations, cash celebrations, customised celebrations and creative celebrations. Write them down, please use them. They are really powerful.
The hardest step for me though, is when we are celebrating. And when I mean when that is about building rituals that we can make sure remind us as leaders and as teams to be celebrating. So, there's three ways that we can look at here that I think are impactful. One is how we celebrate small wins. That's as often as possible. And it is all about making sure that we are putting these into our cadences, right. So, as I said earlier, our meetings, into agendas, we have others really reminding us. So, we've structured to celebrate nice and easy.
Number two is how we can celebrate when we have some of those wins that are less obvious, like behavioural wins and process wins. These are the ones that we actually need to go looking for versus ones that will naturally appear and pop up into our weekly sales meetings. So, where we can build rituals that are celebrating behavioural winsā¦these, for me, really drive greater impact and improvement around those behaviours. So the way that I've seen great success here is through strategic planning and in particular the follow-up sessions that come around strategic planning. And the reason I talk about that is because often, certainly with strategic planning that I run with teams is we will have ways of working together or pledges or commitments that a team make that can be structured into our actions and follow ups. So, where we have built that charter or that group ways of working that we've all acknowledged and are regularly catching up through strategic planning initiatives, whether it be monthly or weekly or quarterly, that's when we're able to celebrate those behavioural wins. And those type of wins really lend themselves well to creative celebrations, in particular team celebrations, but also customised celebrations when we see individuals have wins. So number one, the smaller regular behaviours that we can just tick off through a process-driven approach. Number two is the behavioural celebrations that really work well with strategic and more broader type of planning or higher level engagement with the business. And number three is celebrating when we win deals. This for me is the most impactful ritual. We've all heard about teams that'll ring bells or they'll send out horns, or there'll be something really consistent that happens when deals are won. And whilst I may not laugh a bell being rung, mind you, I've used it myself across the past to varying levels of impact. I certainly love the ritual behind it that says when we win deals, we acknowledge and we celebrate. And finding ways in your business to be celebrating each type of customer win that happens. If you're a hunting business, it's easy when you're closing a deal. If you're a farming business, it might be when you renew a contract or when there's significant events with your customers. Or if you're a business that has a bit of everything, it can very much be driven around weekly sales numbers. But where we are celebrating in a consistent manner with our teams, bell ringing, horn tooting, emails, videos, rituals at the start or the end of the week, meals together, lunches, breakfast dinners, muffins when you have a win, whatever it may be, hats, vests, things that actually symbolise that people have done something good or teams have done something good, those are the wins that really drive that morale at an ongoing level. And these type of wins that when we pair them with our small cadence wins and our behavioural wins actually bring together a series of celebrations and rituals that keep teams together. That hit the seven out of ten employees who really appreciate being recognised, that hit the eight out of ten of those employees who will work harder because they've been celebrated. But most importantly, don't take significant time out of our days as sales leaders to be able to impact. So, there's quite a few things in there around celebrations and possibly a little bit different. I think a couple of things in there in particular a little bit different to what you might have heard previously around celebrations. And for me that's because it's often driven at an HR, human resources or people and culture level. But when we can internalise it at a team level, that's when it gets really powerful for me and that's when I see sales teams really succeed.
So, to recap today I've spoken about three types or three ways we can celebrate, which is at a senior exec level, get them buying in, do the work for them. Number two is internally, across your team, generally very much at a cadence level and trying to engage your team to do it with you. Number three, externally across the organisation, when we're wanting to really engage teams into programs that we're doing, how we celebrate, we've spoken about cadence celebrations, straightforward happen regularly, cash celebrations, one quarter only of celebrations, but still powerful. Customised celebrations, when we're really thinking about the individual and the impact. And last but not least, creative celebrations, which will often apply to teams when we are trying to really celebrate something special. And last but not least, rituals, small wins as often as possible, behavioural and process wins generally through that strategic planning or more thoughtful team events. And last but not least, deals, accounts, growth, contracts and they are as often as you can with a very clear ritual as to how we celebrate it. So that is celebrations and to an extent, rituals in a 25-minute podcast.
But before we go, a health and fitness insight, I think, rather than tip from me this week, all about a series, a documentary I've been watching, living to 100 secret of the blue zones. I think a lot of us will have seen or heard of that. It's by Dan Buettner. One thing that for me is really clear, doesn't matter where you are in Okinawa, in southern parts of Italy or pockets around the world, where we do have other blue zones, what's really common is that those that live long and happy have a great social connection. And yes, we can link that to celebrations and rituals, but they engage with people very regularly and have a sense of community. So, when we're looking at a micro-level at how we are staying fit and healthy please don't underestimate the importance of that social connection across family, friends or however you get that. Because if you forget it, particularly when you're working hard and you don't make time to do so, then our lives take on far less purpose. And it's that social connection that can really give us purpose around what we're doing in life. That's it from me today until next week. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.
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