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I love jazz and think the jazz club is a perfect metaphor for a top-performing sales culture. Think about what happens when you enter a great jazz club. In fact, imagine going to the club after a hard day’s work when you aren’t in the mood to have a good time. What happens? Isn’t it true that before long you are tapping your foot to the rhythm? Pretty soon your body starts to sway, a smile lights up your face, and as you look around the room, everyone is moving in time to the music. Usually you end up staying longer than you intended!

What’s happened? The rhythm has infected you and you can’t resist. The beat tells you what’s happening and pulls you along for the ride. The beat also informed the members of the band of the structure, and so a great jazz ensemble can allow an individual musician to riff over the top of the beat, adding his individual gift of expression, and then land back with the rest of the musicians right on the beat. As the musician takes off on his journey of notes, you can feel the rest of the musicians falling in line behind to support the beauty, and the audience relishes each surprising note. A great performance always takes you on a journey, even when you enter the club “not in the mood.”

This is what you are striving for when you build a great sales culture. You create an environment with enough motivational power that when a new member joins the team he or she is infected with the rhythm of your team and can’t resist getting in sync with the group. It is almost effortless. New members can express their unique talents “riffing” over the top and adding their gifts, but in the end landing right on the beat of the team. The rest of the company supports them and effortlessly integrates them into the team’s successes. You create an environment that carries even the seasoned salespeople through the times when they are not in the mood to perform at their best. Does this describe your sales culture today? Or are you more like a grade school band struggling to find the beat?

I’ve seen sales organizations that have rhythm, and you can see the transformative effect it has on people. I was interviewing a saleswoman inside of one such company and she said with excitement: “There is an energy inside the building as the month draws to a close. Everyone just seems alive with the certainty that we’ll exceed the sales target, just as we do every month. You can’t walk through the halls without noticing the tempo.” That’s magic.

If you were to walk through the halls of this company, you’d notice large TV screens with all of their sales results by individuals being continually updated for everyone to see. You would find screens that highlight which customers they’d recently lost to competitors and who were on a win-back list. This team didn’t like to lose, and they didn’t often lose as a result.

Imagine walking into this company as a new salesperson. What would you be thinking? You would instantly know that you were about to play on a great team and would perform better as a result. Any smugness you had about being a star player at your last company would disappear in your desire to prove that you deserve a spot on this A-team. This is the environment you will design for your team when you are a Sales Boss. It makes everything easier.

It’s all in the rhythm. What rhythms have you established for your team that inform them about how the game is played at your company? A great Sales Boss has well-established “Sacred Rhythms.”

What do I mean by sacred? One typically thinks of sacred in a religious context, but the word means that we hold something as highly valued, deserving of respect or devotion. To have Sacred Rhythms within your sales department, you must have established rituals that the team can depend on to be used consistently. We’ll talk throughout this book about what some of the rhythms might be. For instance, your monthly, weekly, and daily communications with your team form the foundational rhythm. The format and expectations of what happens during these meetings become another rhythm. Your team comes to depend on this rhythm for informing them what the beat is of your company and how they sync up with it.

Here is a challenge I see in many underperforming teams: the manager doesn’t have any rhythm! The manager will put a monthly meeting on the schedule, but a few days before will move the meeting for some unexpected travel or another event. Pretty soon the monthly meeting is a quarterly meeting, and this sloppiness seeps into every aspect of the sales team. The weekly coaching sessions become weakly done sessions, if conducted at all. There is no excitement in the halls and no cause for celebration. The month ends as though the team has been running on a treadmill set one setting higher than they can sustain and then, just as they get to the end, they start a new month already drained.

The sales manager makes bad hiring decisions. Sales roles are filled, and then the people are let go, impacting the cohesiveness of the team and sucking out the willingness of the team to get behind the next new salesperson. As a result, the rest of the company treats any new hire with a “wait-and-see” attitude before jumping in to help the person be successful. The manager loses any credibility. That’s not magic. It’s the kiss of death – indeed, a slow painful death. A Sales Boss doesn’t have that problem.

You are responsible for the energy, music, and rhythms in your jazz club. Would they make you want to dance and stay longer than you intended? Developing Sacred Rhythms means that you decide what needs to happen and that those items are sacred. They don’t move, alter, or change. Your team understands that’s the way it happens. They understand the beat, and they start to depend on it.

Not everything can be sacred; you’ll need some flexibility. But some things must be highly valued, deserving of respect and devotion, or nothing will be. Your role as manager is to decide what is sacred and communicate that clearly to your team. I’ll be offering some suggestions within the pages of this book, and you will want to pick the ones most important to you for the stage of development of your team.

Before we move on, how would you rate your rhythm? Better yet, how would your team rate your rhythm?