This exercise works for a founder with one person selling alongside them, a small team, or someone doing all the selling themselves. Go through it, and you’ll get a clearer picture of how your people are working, what they understand about the brand, and what would make their days more effective.

If you haven’t done our founder exercise, A Simple Exercise to Get Clear on Where Your Business Is Going, you might like to start there before doing this one with your team. This one builds on it. Once you know where you want to go, you need to know if your team knows that too.

Most small CPG brands don’t have a formal sales onboarding process. The founder sells first, figures out what works, and then hands that knowledge off informally. In a car on the way to a sales call, over a quick coffee, through a shared spreadsheet that made sense at the time.

At some point, the brand story lives entirely in the founder’s head. The sales approach varies depending on who’s having the conversation. Nobody is quite sure what a good week looks like or why.

These 17 questions surface all of that. Not to criticize anyone. Your team is probably doing their best with what it has. The point is to find out what they have, what they’re missing, and what would make the biggest difference if you gave it to them.

The answers will also tell you something about yourself as a leader. If most of your team can’t answer the brand and mission questions, that’s not a team problem. It’s a communication problem, and it’s solvable!

A Note for the Solo Founder

If it’s just you right now, you’re both the founder and the sales team (among other things). Do this exercise anyway. Answer every question as honestly as you can. Some of them will be harder to answer than you expected, which is exactly the point.

How to Run It

Give each person their own copy of the questions and ask them to set aside a couple of hours to answer them privately, in writing, without discussing them with anyone else first. There are no wrong answers, but you don’t benefit from shared responses. Honest responses are more useful than polished ones, and you won’t get that if people are comparing notes. If your team works together in person, you can do it in the same room, but with quiet time. Hold off on sharing until everyone has finished. If you’re working remotely, send it individually and set a short deadline.

When you get to the last question, “How can we help?”, tell your team to write down what they actually need, even if they think you don’t want to hear it. Especially then.

Read through every response yourself before discussing them as a group. Look for patterns. Where is the alignment strong? Where is it missing? What keeps coming up across multiple people?

If you can, have a one-on-one conversation with each person after they’ve submitted their answers. That’s where even more candid insights will come through.

Brand & Mission Alignment

1. Why are you a part of this sales team?
2. Do you know the mission of the company?
3. Do you know the vision of the company?
4. What does the company sell?
5. What does the company really sell?

These five questions are deceptively simple. Most teams can answer the fourth one. Fewer can answer the fifth with any consistency, and the fifth is the one that matters in a sales conversation. What you sell is a product. What you really sell is the outcome, the feeling, the reason someone picks your brand over the one beside it. If your team can’t articulate that, your customers are figuring it out on their own.

Customer & Brand Knowledge

1. Who is an ideal customer?
2. How do you find them?
3. What are the benefits of your products or services for your customers?
4. What do your customers appreciate most about the company?
5. What stories do you find yourself telling most often about the brand?

The last question here is one of the most useful. The stories your team tells most often are the ones that land, resonate with buyers, come up naturally in conversation, and feel true. Those stories are your sales assets. Write them down and share them with the entire team.

Personal Workflow & Support

1. What does an average day look like for you?
2. What works really well for you?
3. How do you structure your day and week?
4. What would help you sell more confidently: tools, training, materials, or other information?
5. How do you feel about your sales goals and how they’re set?
6. What are your biggest challenges in your work?
7. How can we help?

This group is where most of the actionable information comes to light. You’ll learn how your team spends their time, what’s making their jobs harder than they need to be, and what they wish they had. Take the answers seriously. A sales rep who doesn’t have the right materials, doesn’t understand the goals, or doesn’t feel supported will underperform regardless of how good they are.

The last question is the most important one on the page. Give people the space and support to answer it fully.

What to Do With the Answers

Once you’ve read through everything, look for three things.

Where is the team aligned with the brand, and where aren’t they? Misalignment here is almost always a training and communication opportunity, not a performance issue.

What are the most common requests or challenges? If multiple people mention the same thing, it’s a priority. Build it, fix it, or address it directly.

What surprised you? The answers you didn’t expect are usually the most valuable.

Bring the themes back to the team in a group conversation. Not to call anyone out, but to show that you heard them and to start building the systems and clarity that will make everyone’s work more effective.

If you’re working with Seaworthy, bring your completed responses and your team’s answers to The Survey. Teams are often more open with an outside perspective, and in an Anchors Aweigh engagement, we run this exercise as part of the work together.

A Final Note

Building a sales team around a values-led brand is different from building one around a quota. The goal isn’t compliance. It’s alignment. When your team understands the mission, knows the customer, and has what they need to do their jobs well, sales conversations get easier, results become more consistent, and the whole team starts rowing in the same direction, ready for what’s next.