Workplace diversity is all about hiring a team that comes from a wide range of racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds, education levels, beliefs, genders, ages, disabilities, and sexual orientations. To hire people from diverse backgrounds in good faith, you also have to provide a welcoming and inclusive workspace for everyone. Doing so will then enable you to better hire diversely.

The goal of diverse hiring and inclusive workplaces is to reduce the negative impacts of unchecked bias or the danger of creating an echo chamber. But diversity and inclusion in your sales team can also positively impact your sales. Here are a few reasons why:

Deeper Understanding of Different Demographics

If you plan to market primarily to college students and zoomers but your entire sales team is made up of middle aged or older sales professionals, you’ll have a bit of an uphill climb when it comes to target audience research. But when you have sales professionals who just left college last year, they’ll have personal insight into the minds of that demographic. On the other hand, if you need to market to the senior population, you’ll struggle to do so with only a team of twenty-somethings.

A diverse workplace allows your team to have more empathy and first-hand understanding of different demographics, which can help you to better market to them.

Improved Customer Relationships

Customers like to have someone that they can relate to. When your diverse sales team can better understand the concerns and needs of different demographics, they’ll be able to better relate to them in sales conversations. This will help your customers to bond with your business, as it were. They may feel more satisfied working with you and may be more loyal to your company in the future.

Easier Reach of New Markets

A diverse sales team can also help you if you plan to branch out into new markets, whether across the country or even internationally. If you have a business in the northeast, for instance, but you want to start marketing to the west coast, more Latinx sales professionals may be helpful when reaching out to areas that have higher Latinx populations. If you plan to branch out to Korea, and you have employees who have Korean relatives, they may be able to help you bridge the cultural divide.

Better Employee Engagement

This is where the inclusion part comes in. It’s not enough to simply hire diversely. You have to create a workplace that is safe and inclusive of diverse backgrounds and individuals. This often means challenging your own biases and making accommodations when necessary. When you do this, however, your employees will feel more comfortable and engaged with their workplace. They may feel safer there than they have in previous jobs. And when employees are more engaged, they work more productively, both individually and as a team. This will in turn lead to a better output and sales bottom line for you overall.

Better Employee Retention

And, of course, when your employees are more engaged and happier in your company, they’re more likely to stay. A high turnover can disrupt your company’s workflow and output, and it can make it difficult to maintain a cohesive company culture. It can be a vicious cycle leading to lower morale and then more turnover. But when you can retain your employees for years, they become used to working with each other. They learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses and how they can be as efficient as possible. The more efficiently you work together, the better your sales will be.

More Out of the Box Thinking

When you fail to hire diversely, your company can easily create an echo chamber of people with more or less the same experiences who think more or less the same way. This might mean you have fewer disputes at work, but it can also mean that you are closed off to different valuable perspectives.

When you hire more diversely and welcome diverse perspectives, you get more out of the box thinking. Your ideas will be fresher and more innovative, with more context of how those ideas will be received by different communities.

Part of inclusion is fostering these ideas, rewarding them and encouraging them. Remember that if you don’t create an inclusive environment for your employees, they’ll likely go elsewhere and someone else will benefit from their creativity. When you foster inclusion in your workplace, the result will be a more innovative and competitive sales approach for your company as a whole.