Guiding Sales Principles - What are your beliefs?

While I was managing teams at Salesforce we would have a management off-site late every year to create and drive buy-in for the following year's company plan. It was a fun but intense 2-3 day exercise where Marc would teach, enlighten, and challenge the company executives to think about our business in new ways - ways that would drive more success for our customers, partners, and employees. He called this Ohana, the Hawaiian term for family. The meeting was always one of the highlights of my year and something I looked very forward to.

I always learned much in those meetings but some critical components were start with a "vision" and a set of "guiding principles" that anchor and guide that vision. Sales leaders and individual contributors must start the same way. What is your vision? What are your values or underlying principles? How do the guiding principles support the vision and manifest the right behaviors and action. My personal sales vision has always been consistent - become a "trusted advisor" for my clients. Here are a few of my own personal guiding principles that support my vision:

• We are in the business of providing solutions that fulfill our client's needs

• First seek to understand, then seek to be understood

• We don't sell products, we sell change that leads to positive business outcomes for our clients

• Our job, as a selling organization, is to facilitate a process that brings the sale to an outcome, which is a "yes" or "no" in a timeframe that is mutually agreed upon by both parties