How to build high performing and resilient sales teams? Sudhir Nayar, MD Commercial Sales, Cisco - B2B Ampliz

Sudhir Nayar is the Managing Director of Commercial Sales at Cisco. For the past 30 years, he has led IT sales operations by creating skilled and empowered teams. In the process, he has mentored budding leaders for the Indian IT industry. Sudhir leads IT sales teams across large enterprises and SMB, built and transformed channels, developed a corporate strategy for leading IT companies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft, and Cisco. He is always looking out to participate in industry forums to learn, share my perspectives, and interact with like-minded professionals on digital platforms. Sudhir is an eloquent speaker, great mentor, environmentalist, Strategic Leader Focused On Revenue, Growth, and Profit Maximisation.

At Ampliz B2b Binge, he spoke elaborately on how to build high performing and resilient sales teams. He has outlined five steps to building transformative teams.

1. Build trust within the team

2. Focus on the health of the business

3. Building a winning culture

4. Formulate a three-year plan

5. Effective communication

Build trust

Listen more. The first time you meet your team, talk to teammates about their success, how can, as an organization, you can help them grow and ask how can you help them achieve the goals. When you ask them these sets of questions, they start opening up to you. Your teammate becomes a little chatty and starts trusting you. Go back to them and tell them what can be done now and what can be done later. Focus on their strength and try to leverage them.

Focus on the health of the business

Most businesses focus on topline and bottom line. However, as a leader, you should focus on what is coming in the future and prepare your team. Keep an eye out for the changing trends and communicate it to your teams regularly. Please encourage them to adapt to the changes and keep learning new things.

Build a winning culture

Build culture by inspiring them and giving them a sense of safety. When people feel safe and hopeful, they can choose to go beyond what is expected of them. Then your job changes form inspecting to inspiring people. Your work now is instilling hope in them. That is when the time arises, they give more than 100% of their abilities. Accept failure and foster growth and nurturing.

Formulate a 3 Year plan

As a leader amongst leaders, you should have a six month, one year, and a three-year plan—Breakdown the big picture in your mind into bite-size achievable chunks to make things easier.

Communication Plan

All the plans and the above-mentioned activities will fail if you don't have a concrete communication plan. Understand who are your key stakeholders are and what their priorities are. Focus on how you can align the priorities to achieve the goals. But it has to be adequately communicated. Therefore, have a communication plan that aligns with your key stakeholders and speaks their language.