8 Essential Skills for Building a Successful Team

For revenue operations leaders in fast-growing SaaS companies, building a high-performing sales team across distributed locations can be a real challenge.

The world’s best universities offer courses on how to do it, seminars and conferences on team building abound and you can even attend lectures on leadership by football managers like Sir Alex Ferguson.

Each salesperson can naturally forge their own path but there are several key aspects everyone should use in building a successful team. By applying these strategies, revenue leaders can set their teams up for sustainable success. Here are the essential steps:

Essential Team Building Skills

Building successful teams requires mastering specific skills that enable effective collaboration, communication, and performance. 96% of business decision-makers and 95% of surveyed employees believe effective communication is one of the most critical skills they will need for the coming year.

The core team building skills include:

• Communication: Clear, consistent messaging across all channels and team levels
• Leadership: Guiding team direction while empowering individual contributions
• Problem-solving: Collaborative approach to identifying and resolving challenges
• Reliability: Consistent follow-through on commitments and responsibilities
• Empathy: Understanding and responding to team members’ perspectives and needs
• Delegation: Effectively distributing tasks based on individual strengths
• Motivation: Inspiring team members to achieve both individual and collective goals

Trust forms the foundation of all these skills. When present at above-average levels within a team, trust produces transformative results: such teams demonstrate 3.3 times greater efficiency and are 5.1 times more likely to produce desired results compared with teams scoring below average on trust measures.

Frameworks for Successful Teamwork (5 Cs and 7 Cs)

Structured frameworks provide proven models for understanding and implementing team effectiveness. The most recognised approaches are the 5 Cs and 7 Cs of teamwork, which offer comprehensive blueprints for building high-performing teams.

As team effectiveness experts note, “All five elements of effective teamwork must be present for the team to reach its full potential—teams cannot have some of these elements while neglecting others and expect sustained high performance.” Similarly, the Seven Cs framework emphasises that improving team performance requires attention to all dimensions simultaneously.

Encourage Experimentation and Embrace Diversity

How were the greatest empires built? Hard work and determination play their part but successful empires last because their rulers experimented with new ideas and identified news areas to profit from. Alexander the Great adapted his tactics to win every battle whereas Samsung started out as a grocery store.

Look for salespeople who are willing to take risks and try new ideas that will boost your profits. You can set aside time each week to come up with new concepts separately from other sales meetings. Your team will appreciate being part of the decision-making process and being part of a challenging supportive environment.

You should also hire people who’ll work differently than you would. There’s no point in hiring people who’re the same as you, otherwise, you could do their job, right? Embracing intellectual diversity will ensure you consider methods and ideas you never normally would.

Invest in communication

Nothing kills sales more than poor communication. You need to consistently and concisely convey what you want and how you want it achieved if you want to succeed.

Set up clear channels of communication that are easy for the team to understand and follow. Involve every team member relevant to the task to ensure no one misses out. Make sure you follow up on every sales lead and internal memo.

Try setting up team building exercises based on different forms of communication—including written, verbal, and asynchronous digital updates. Revenue Grid’s platform helps distributed teams stay aligned and ensure no detail is missed. This will boost both your team’s communication skills as well as their cohesion as a unit and they’ll appreciate having fun in the process. You’ll also discover new ways you can convey information to your customers.

For enterprise sales teams managing complex deals across multiple stakeholders, effective communication becomes even more critical. Revenue Grid’s activity capture technology automatically logs all customer interactions, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks during handoffs between team members. Learn how Revenue Grid’s communication tools stand apart from competitors.

Foster Humility and Open-Mindedness

We cannot overemphasize how many businesses have gone under because the leader had too much ego. Ego can destroy the best product, the best sales team, and it can be so insidious you don’t realise it’s doing so. Yes, salespeople need to be confident but ego is an altogether different creature.

Ego prevents you from building a successful team because it clouds your judgement, makes you appear arrogant to the customer and prevents you from recognising your colleague’s skills. Ego makes you think you’re the best, so why bother trying something new? Why hire new staff when you’re clearly more skilled?

Bear in mind Sigmund Freud’s advice on the subject; “The ego is not master in its own house.” You don’t rule your ego, it rules you, so kill it.

Promote Autonomy and Trust

Nearly as deadly as ego to building a successful team is micromanagement. This blight on business is guaranteed to ruin staff morale and make your team feel like they’re not working in a supportive environment. Nobody likes a micromanager so don’t become one.

Micromanagement creates drones who don’t appreciate the company and won’t take the initiative because they’re afraid of upsetting the boss. Avoid this by embracing experimentation as we mentioned before and allow your staff to take risks even if they make mistakes. In fact, if one of your salespeople fails to close a deal but worked hard and took a risk rather than giving up, you should reward them.

This might sound risky but in the long run it’s better for your team because you’ll be able to focus on the strategic direction of your company. Don’t get bogged down in everyday decisions, focus on your long term goals. Focus on motivating your sales team rather than day to day management.

Set clear goals.

How will you know if you’ve got anywhere if you don’t have a plan for getting there? If you’re set on building a successful sales team you have to lay out goals that go beyond just ‘making X amount of money’ or ‘I want to live on a beach in two years.’ Your goals need to be short and long term, concise, and clear to everybody on your team.

Effective goal-setting frameworks like SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) provide structure for both individual and team objectives. Consider implementing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for quarterly alignment across your revenue organisation.

Explain the vision of your company and product by setting long term goals. Explain how you’ll achieve your vision by setting short term goals. Sell these goals to your team and see if they buy them.

Don’t be too protective of your goals as everyone on the team should know them, even if you fail. Teams can learn a lot from their mistakes, the key here is to be realistic so that you don’t feel like you are working for a lost cause, you should be fair to yourself and your employees.

Share your success.

Sharing your success needs to go beyond just publishing profit figures and increased customer uptake. Once you’ve set your goals, ie, you know where you’re going, don’t forget where you’ve come from. Make sure everyone has access to previous goals, both successful and failed, as this will make your team appreciate everyone’s work.

Also, we live in the era of big data so you need to share your success metrics and KPIs. Everyone on the team should know their own targets and those of their colleagues. Think of this system as your success scorecard.

This scorecard will make sure your team will be more connected with their colleagues and empower them to make choices that will benefit the company. If you don’t share success your team will at best make ill-informed decisions, at worst, they won’t make decisions at all.

Common Challenges in Team Building and How to Overcome Them

Even with the best intentions and frameworks, teams face predictable obstacles that can derail performance. Understanding these challenges and having strategies to address them is crucial for sustained success.

Lack of Trust and Psychological Safety

Teams without trust struggle with open communication and risk-taking. Create psychological safety by encouraging questions, admitting mistakes openly, and celebrating learning from failures.

Unclear Roles and Responsibilities

Confusion about who does what leads to duplicated effort and missed opportunities. Develop clear RACI matrices (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) for key processes and decisions.

Remote and Hybrid Work Challenges

Distributed teams face unique communication and collaboration hurdles. Only 31% of U.S. employees were engaged in 2024, while best-practice organisations reach engagement rates of 70%. Implement regular check-ins, virtual team building activities, and ensure equal participation in meetings.

Resistance to Change

Team members may resist new processes or technologies. Address this through transparent communication about the reasons for change, involving team members in the planning process, and providing adequate training and support.

How Revenue Grid Supports Team Building

Revenue Grid’s Revenue Action Platform addresses many common team building challenges by providing 360-degree pipeline visibility and automated activity capture. Unlike generic sales tools, Revenue Grid delivers actionable revenue intelligence and guided selling paths that help enterprise teams close deals faster.

The platform’s deep native integration into daily workflows—including inboxes, CRMs, Slack, and Teams—means teams can collaborate more effectively without adopting new tools. See how Emerald Scientific achieved faster deal cycles with Revenue Grid.

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