Building and Leading a Successful Sales Team On this episode of the podcast, Allison Walsh, Vice President of Business Development and Branding for Advanced Recovery Systems, a national behavioral healthcare company, discusses her experience in building and leading a successful sales team. Starting as the second employee of the company, she has been instrumental in its growth to a team of a thousand and counting. The organization offers inpatient substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, and a mental wellness application called Nobu. Walsh shares insights on the importance of trust, relationships, and professional development in nurturing and retaining sales talent, as well as the challenges and opportunities of pivoting to virtual selling during the pandemic. Allison shares her experience of nurturing and developing sales talent, and her journey as a young leader managing more experienced team members. Trust, relationships, and professional development are instrumental in nurturing and retaining sales talent. Focus on personal and professional development instead of financial incentives. Showing extreme compassion and support for your team pays off in the long run for both company culture and retention. Create other career pathways for people to develop personally and professionally, even if they don't want the responsibility of managing humans. Motions that leaders do to create relationship and trust with their people are the same behaviors that salespeople can emulate to build relationship and trust with their prospects. Allison shares how her organization pivoted to virtual selling during the pandemic and invested in video technology to communicate with their partners for a blended approach to sales. Discover the power of seeing, valuing, and hearing every employee and looking at the world from the perspective of "everybody matters."