When you’re growing a business or building a sales unit, it’s important that you have a common mantra or standard that is shared and believed in by the entire team to keep you centred and driven. This allows you to work towards a common goal and help to keep each other focused and committed.

Why do we need to have a common Mantra?

Whether you are starting a new team from scratch or building on an existing unit, this mantra should be the glue that holds you together and keeps you pointed in the right direction as a unit.

The benefit of creating this as a team rather than a directive that ‘feeds down from above’ is that you have the emotional buy in of the team all the time as they are a part of the creation. When done right, this mantra becomes a standard that enables the team to hold each other accountable too – they become self managing to an extent as long as they agree and believe in the standards that they have helped to set.

This is when you know you have created an environment and culture that not only your team will enjoy and benefit from, but your business too. A sales unit that is working towards a mantra that they have emotional investment in won’t allow themselves or their colleagues to forget or slack off on this front. They will police themselves as per their own standards and they will drive each other to new heights as a natural by product of the competitive nature of a sales environment.

What are the benefits of this environment?

As this environment grows it strengthens many aspects of the team – cohesion between individuals grows as a result of the dynamics they are reinforcing in all they do. The ability for individuals to control their environments is a very empowering emotion, to do this as part of a group only serves to reinforce the group dynamics between individuals.

By involving the team in the determination of the standards and mantra you are able to preempt many of the challenges that arise when managing a sales team. The team is easily held accountable as everything is being collectively agreed and they have to some extent helped to define these expectations themselves.

The individuals will also feel more in control and inclined to offer honest feedback on how they are perceiving their working environment – if they feel they have a voice and a value you will get their honest responses in what is and isn’t working and how best to improve the conditions if things are not as good as they could be.

Always be flexible – a Mantra can evolve over time…

While the Mantra is vital and it needs to be firm for people to stay true to it and hold each other accountable as a team, it is important to recognise that any group can and will evolve over time, your Mantra should have the same opportunity.

If the team diverges, or grows, or there is a large rotation in members, make sure to gauge whether or not it is necessary to revisit the mantra so that everyone is still unified in their connection to it and commitment to holding themselves and others accountable to the standards that you are measuring yourselves against.