Have you ever met someone who you knew was just meant to be in sales?  Someone who maybe you joked could “sell ice to Eskimos.”

Chances are you have either come across someone like that at least once in your lifetime or you work with them now. Or maybe, just maybe, you are who you are thinking about.

Regardless, when it comes to being a great sales person it can be an innate characteristic – but most often it is a skill that was developed and coached.  It took time to grow and was fostered through mentorship, driven by positive reinforcement and motivation, and most importantly, led by great example.

That being said, many sales managers wonder how they can build a dynamic sales team. They are tasked with results orientated quotas and often feel like they can’t find “good staff.” The big mistake they make is that they don’t know what to look for when hiring and often make the mistake of hiring someone based on their previous successes.

Building a dynamic sales team is not easy. It is truly an art. It takes time, effort and an open mind to really make the right hiring decisions. The key is to recognize there are strengths in those sales people that innately are talented but to more importantly recognize that you can create a results-motivated dynamic team structure and environment that allows average and star salespeople to excel.

To build a dynamic sales team, as a manager, you must take ownership of your results and the company’s values and goals. You must then use that ownership and foster your team with the same methodology. You must lead by example. You should be consistently motivating your team. You need to understand your team’s challenges and work with them to achieve success. You can’t just manage. You must coach and lead. You need to reinforce what is trained and inspect what you expect. You should always be developing and encouraging your team.

Building this sort of team does take time and usually requires dedicated time beyond the day-to-day operations to complete. When determining who is a good fit for the team you have to consider two things. It is not just what they bring immediately (instant sales growth) that counts but the value they can build into a business should be considered as well.

Dynamic sales team aren’t built overnight. It takes a little bit “extra” to go from ordinary to …extraordinary. Now you must ask yourself, are you willing to put in that little bit extra?