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9 Tips for Winning Go-to-Market Team Dynamics (April 2022)

Successful go-to-market teams create positive team dynamics focusing on setting achievable but challenging goals while developing a learning-based environment that achieves personal, team, and organizational growth.Successful go-to-market teams create positive team dynamics focusing on setting achievable but challenging goals while developing a learning-based environment that achieves personal, team, and organizational growth.

As a result, a long-lasting, winning culture is created, developing a flywheel effect as you hire, train, and promote future generations of employees.

In this article, we will discuss what to avoid and what to do to create a winning revenue organization focusing on team dynamics and overall culture.

What is organizational culture?

Organizational culture is simply a shorthand way of expressing the team’s beliefs, standard modes of working together, communication styles, and so forth.

If you were to treat the entire organization as a single person, we could refer to the culture as that individual’s personality.

What do we mean by building effective team dynamics?

Team dynamics are the relationships between individuals on the team, leading to communicating and collaborating effectively.

The interaction of all the individual team interactions creates the culture.

So, before we dive into creating positive team dynamics and culture, let’s answer a more fundamental question.

What are examples of effective team dynamics?

Positive sales team dynamics exhibit the following traits:

  • Empathy and respect
  • Trust in each person’s motivations
  • Focus on achieving business goals
  • Support for each person’s individual growth
  • Open communication
  • Respectful debate
What happens to team culture when these team dynamics are in place?

A team focused on achieving business results while:

  • Doing so ethically and legally, not falling into the win at all cost mentality that destroys businesses.
  • Supporting each other’s needs for personal growth.
  • Respecting each person’s positive mental health.

As we discussed “what are examples of effective team dynamics”, and the positive results of those dynamics, we failed to touch upon tips for creating these behaviors.

Let’s explore those next.

Best practices for developing excellent sales team dynamics

What are examples of effective team dynamics, and, more importantly, how do we create them?

In a nutshell, excellent sales team dynamics lead to a team that supports each other and their customers to get the best solutions to their problems possible.

How do we build this environment?

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#1 Focus on developing a continuous learning environment

Invest in teams and individuals to develop skills they need for their jobs and skills they need for their careers.

Balance this learning with teaching managers how to effectively coach their teams. You will create a creative, problem-solving environment focused on finding solutions to even the most challenging problems.

Make use of The Surrounded Learner technique to ensure the learning isn’t thrown down the drain.

Sales training can be a critical investment or a waste of time. The Surrounded Learner Technique is the key to your team's success.

#2 Create opportunities for people to be their whole self

To the degree that each individual is comfortable, find team-building exercises where people can be themselves. This will lead to a greater understanding of individual needs and personal values, creating more robust and effective teams.

#3 Effective communication, regularly

monday.com logoLack of trust destroys relationships and teams.

One of the best ways to mitigate the risk of poor team dynamics that lead to mistrust is frequent communication. Use it; it’s a good idea.

One technology to consider is monday.com.

#4 Goal setting and time management

Use a methodology like OKRs that reinforces the business goals while allowing individuals and teams to take ownership of achieving those outcomes.

Giving group members a shared goal leads to a shared sense of purpose.

This shared sense of purpose, when combined with ownership of how to solve this shared sense of purpose, it is an effective way to meet aggressive goals.

In addition, use time management solutions like Time Doctor to ensure teams are able to learn from their current focus areas and learn to use this knowledge to invest in the right areas.  A common example is a salesperson doing email all day vs. picking up the phone and making calls.

Time Doctor, as one example, is an excellent solution for helping sellers manage their time.

#5 Celebrate team and individual successes

But don’t make up reasons to celebrate.

Celebrate genuine wins, overcome challenging situations and achieve hard goals.

Whether these wins are personal or team level, celebrate.

#6 Demonstrate the value of constructive criticism

From executives through the individual team leader, business leaders at all levels need to show a desire to learn and improve. This is the best way to demonstrate a willingness to grow and improve.

This demonstrates a level of mutual respect, leading to the creation of great leaders and strong group dynamics.

#7 Grit – Passion and Perseverance
#8 Live by the Sundown Rule

Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

The idea is simple — if you can do something to help the team today, do it instead of waiting until tomorrow.

The Sundown Rule is great, but be careful.

Implemented poorly, the Sundown Rule can create a culture that fails to appreciate and support work-life balance.

#9 Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration

So many things can be done to create the ideal work environment for cross-functional collaboration. The five best tips are:

Diversification

When creating a cross-functional team you want a variety of professional backgrounds, genders, locations, and ethnicities. Creating a team with these attributes makes a team more diverse and insightful in leadership style, thoughts, and skills.

These types of teams assess problems and formulate a solution to successfully solve them; quickly.

Leverage shared knowledge

A team that doesn’t share its knowledge and expertise, no matter how diverse the team members are, isn’t a cross-functional team.

Cross-functional teams thrive off the fact that members are from different departments, with different levels of work and life experience. All of this should be used when working together.

Everything that needs troubleshooting, and every new idea for a product or service needs the full attention and knowledge of everyone on the team.

A strong, respected leader

With so many different departments, a strong leader is vital. Someone who keeps the team members accountable for their contributions and individual efforts.

Because this is a diverse range of departments, a leader needs to not only be strong but also someone who inspires the respect and confidence of the team.

And, as with all leaders, they must be excellent communicators.

Using communication tools

Project management apps are your friend. There are so many good ones out there, all you need is one that allows your team to communicate in real-time, share files and documents, as well as updates.

A centralized communication tool also helps people stay connected in a way emails and spreadsheets cannot.

KPIs and project milestones

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and project milestones help cross-functional teams stay on track. And they’re a great way of keeping team members accountable and measuring their effectiveness.

Project milestones are also a useful way of letting team members know when they are doing well. And this has been shown to help boost morale and improve productivity.

Tips for being an effective collaborator

To be an effective collaborator a team member needs to be good at communicating and be a team player. They need to have an understanding of their own, and the team’s, objectives.

The most effective collaborators are always learning with their colleagues, sharing knowledge, and contributing.

Effective collaborators are also good at giving and taking constructive criticism, as well as being able to adapt to the situation in front of them.

Final thoughts

The result of investing in building excellent team dynamics is a culture that is comfortable with dealing with unexpected challenges, aggressive goals, and the conflicts that arise as a result.

The bottom line?

Developing positive group dynamics will payoff for individual team members and your business.

Just do it.

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