If you want to build a great sales team, there are only seven things you need to worry about. That's it. Just seven things.

And what you've been taught, what you've been focusing on, it's all wrong. Okay, step number one in building a great sales team is set clear expectations. I came into sales from an operations environment.

I had 300 people working for me doing manual labor, really heavy duty manual labor. And it was very easy for me to set expectations with them. There was a specific job to do, move this thing from point A to point B. If you did it, that was a great job and it was done and it was over.

When it comes to sales, there are many different levels of expectation. You may be in a corporate environment where your salespeople have to worry about what they're doing day to day, and then they have to worry about weekly report, and then they have to worry about hitting their annual quota. Well, I think that's too complicated.

You as a sales manager should be focusing on setting clear expectations for what the salespeople need to do in order to be good, and then in order to be outstanding in their role. In my company, my salespeople need to do $250,000 in annual revenue each year in order to be good. If you bring in a new $250,000 every year, you're fine.

You'll keep your job. Less than $250,000, you might actually lose your job. And then above $250,000, when you get to $500,000 or even a million, you're excellent.

And their commissions are reflective of this. So my expectations of them on an annual basis are clear. Now, they may need some guidance in order to get to that end number.

And then for that guidance, I'll give them daily things they need to work on. I'll give them weekly things they need to work on and monthly things they need to work on. But the guidance is just that.

It's guidelines, things they can do to achieve the ultimate outcome. That's my point. You need to allow the best people to do what they do best, set the expectations first, and then turn your people loose.

If they're trained and they're experienced, they'll hit their targets. So the first thing to do is set clear expectations. The second thing when building a great sales team is focus on outcomes.

You heard me say that in order to keep your job with my company, you had to sell $250,000 a year. So that breaks down roughly into about, if they're between $50,000 and $100,000 a quarter, I think they're doing just fine. If after that first quarter, they haven't hit that $50,000 mark, it shows me that they're struggling and it's going to be hard for them to catch up during the course of the year.

I'll jump in and I'll say, listen, you didn't hit your 50 number for the first quarter of the year. You only hit 30,000. I'm concerned that you're not going to hit your annual goal.

Let's talk about what you're working on and let's talk about your approach. So because we're focused on outcomes, I can give them guidance in order to get to that outcome, but I'm not going to suffocate them and tell them you must make 10 phone calls every day. You must book two appointments every week.

You must close one deal every week or four deals a month. I'm not going to tell them that. Why am I not going to tell them that? Because if I hired the right salespeople, then they're going to put pressure on themselves.

And there's no greater pressure a sales manager can put on a salesperson than the pressure they're putting on themselves. So you focus on the outcomes. The annual outcome is great.

The annual goal is great for your top level salespeople. If they're doing well, just call them up and congratulate them on another great month or another great quarter. Ask them if there's anything they need.

Ask them if there's any barriers to success you can remove for them and then let them go do their thing. Don't micromanage them. If your salespeople are not up to speed, they're not hitting their number on an annual basis.

When you look at the quarterly numbers, then you can get in and offer some help, offer some training, offer some guidance. If they don't continue to improve or if they don't start to improve, then you got to get really tough and look at their activity and offer a more hands-on approach to what they're doing on a daily basis only if they're not performing. Okay, step number three in how to build a great sales team is to track and measure just a few key performance indicators.

So like I said, the annual number is the thing. If you back into it monthly, if they're hitting that monthly target, they're doing great. I want you to go to your best people and say, what do you do every week? What do you do every month? What do you do every day? What growth measurements do you use to make sure you're on track? And then offer those key performance indicators to the other members of your team.

Say, listen, Joe is our top salesperson and he's in a region that's very similar to yours. He makes 20 phone calls a day, books one or two appointments a week, and closes four deals a month. I think those are good goals for you.

Why don't you try and hit those key performance indicators? Now, these are not clubs for you to use to beat over the head of your salespeople. They're best practices. They're guidelines for you to help your salespeople know if they're on track or not.

So if your salespeople have the ideal client in mind and they're making 20 phone calls a day to the ideal client and they're booking two appointments a week and that's what the best do, then you should have confidence that the salespeople that are following that guide will be successful eventually. If they're not, then you should ride along with them and look at what they're doing and offer tweaks to their performance so that they can adjust the language, they can adjust their approach and be more successful in the long run. The fourth thing you should do if you're looking to build a great sales team is have frequent communication.

This is particularly true with new salespeople. You don't want to smother successful or more experienced salespeople. Leave the communication up to them.

Maybe set a weekly meeting where you spend 10 minutes just seeing how things are going. In fact, with my best salespeople, my weekly meetings are just very casual conversations where I ask them how they're doing, I ask them how their day is going, I ask them what they need from me, if there are any barriers that I can remove to help them become more successful, but I still talk to my best once a week. My underperforming salespeople, I like to speak to them at the beginning of the day to see how they're setting their day up and then I like to talk to them again at the end of the day to see what they've done.

If they get back on track, if they start closing more deals, I'll back off the communication. But frequency of communication builds trust not only with your clients but also with your team and that frequency of communication will keep them on their toes. Again, I'm not smothering them, I'm just looking to understand what their activity is and offer any guidance I can to see if they're going to be successful.

If you prefer, and this is the way I do it, I eliminated that stand-up meeting and I just do video. So I do a video just like this, I shoot it on a software called Loom, L-O-O-M, and I send it out to my sales team. They all watch the video, I get a notice when they watch it, and they know what the new news is at the company, they know what I have to focus on this week, what I want them to focus on this week, and they know whom I'm recognizing from last week, who had the best week in our group.

That's what I do in my weekly stand-up meeting, I just do it on a video. Because nobody comes into my office, I don't have daily meetings, but I do touch base with my entire team at least twice a week. I call each of them on the phone, see how they're doing, some of them we do FaceTime with.

Frequency of communication builds trust. If somebody's in the middle of a big deal, I may talk to that person three or four times a day. If somebody's struggling, I may talk to that person three or four times a day.

Frequency of communication is essential when you're building a great sales team. The fifth thing I need you to do if you want to build a great sales team is to remove all barriers. Start with meetings.

I don't want you to have any meetings. Maybe once every two or three months you have a meeting with your team. Don't force them all to drive to the same location.

Do it on Zoom, and when you're done with the Zoom meeting, let them go. That's a big, big barrier. Reports are another barrier.

I want you to remove the barriers of reports. Don't make your salespeople do all kinds of reports. Give them a really simple online form to fill out at the end of the day, or even better, at the end of the week.

Don't force them to do all kinds of onerous reports. That takes away from your selling time. Then commuting.

If your salespeople can do what they do in a virtual environment, let them do it. Don't force them to commute and waste all that time. Anytime your salespeople are not in front of a customer is wasted time.

You want them to be in front of customers as often as possible. If virtual sales is accepted in your industry, let them do Zoom meetings. Let them do Skype.

Let them do FaceTime. That's better than having them commute to and from somewhere for an in-person meeting. In high-ticket sales, oftentimes you'll need to be in the same room, particularly in a B2B environment.

In that case, the barrier is budget. Allow them to fly comfortably to the meeting. Allow them to get to the meeting the night before, and allow them to fly home afterwards.

If they have points and they want to use those points to upgrade to business class, let them do it. In fact, if your salespeople are successful, let them buy a business class ticket if you're in high-ticket sales. Why? Because your salespeople need to be rested, their batteries need to be charged, and they need to be in the best mindset in order to be in front of your next big client.

Remove barriers to success. Make it easy for your salespeople to sell. That's point number five.

Point number six, recognize and reward successful people. Now, you need to do both small recognition and large recognition. What do I mean by that? If you have a salesperson who's been struggling and they break out of it and they close a deal, celebrate them with the entire team.

Then your most successful salesperson becomes number one in the company, celebrate that with the team too. You heard me mention that I do a weekly video with my sales team, and on the weekly video, I recognize the top salesperson from the previous week, we congratulate them, and we celebrate them. We have a meeting every quarter, so we have a meeting four times a year, and in that meeting, I recognize the top salesperson of the quarter.

We alternate between in-person meetings and virtual meetings, so I only make my salespeople come to two in-person meetings a year, but even on the virtual meetings, we do a celebration where we congratulate the most successful salesperson for that quarter. Recognition is critical. Why? Because if you're hiring the right salespeople, they are big ego, and they want to be recognized when they're successful, so buy them a trophy, give them a certificate in a frame, shake their hand, take a picture with them.

Even during pandemic times, we fly to the place where our most successful salesperson is, and on his front lawn, we give him his certificate, we shake his hand, even if we're wearing masks, just to show that recognition. Post that picture on LinkedIn, post it on Facebook, post it on your company website. Recognize your best and reward success.

Now we're up to point number seven. This is the point I told you was low-hanging fruit, and this is where I have always been ahead of the curve in my career. You see, I have a relationship mindset, both with my clients and with my sales team members, and I have treated my salespeople like family, and it has always paid off for me.

So I put my relationships with my salespeople first, and I give them every opportunity to succeed, and if they're successful, they stay with me forever. I want you to do the same with your salespeople, because here's what happens. The way you treat your salespeople is the way they're going to treat their clients.

So when my sales person closes a big deal, I fly to the city where they live, I hand them a certificate of recognition, shake their hand, take a picture, I take them to a big dinner. I usually take them and their spouse out to a big dinner, and I always surprise them with something. Sometimes it's a bonus of cash, sometimes it's tickets to go on a trip, sometimes it's something as simple as letting them use the company seats for a baseball game.

But putting the relationship first and focusing on the relationship and helping salespeople spend more time with their families will result in way more productivity than browbeating them. If you demonstrate that you care about your relationship with your salespeople, your salespeople will care about their relationships with their clients. This is how to build a great sales team.

If you want another fantastic video on building a sales team or being a great sales manager, watch the video that's filling in right below me right now. That video is all about how to manage a sales team. I'll see you there.