Have you ever wondered, How can I get my sales team to boost their sales performance? I want you to know with certainty that your sales team has a ton of potential that’s locked within it. And it’s your job as a sales leader to unlock that potential so your organization increases its revenue and increases its market share.
Have you ever wondered, How can I get my sales team to boost their sales performance? I want you to know with certainty that your sales team has a ton of potential that’s locked within it. And it’s your job as a sales leader to unlock that potential so your organization increases its revenue and increases its market share.
Here are 12 ways that you can use right now today to unlock your sales team’s potential.
1. Do you have the right sales team in place?
All too often salespeople look good on paper and you don’t know how well they are going to do until they have been working for you for three months if you are lucky. Sometimes it takes six months to discover you have made a mistake.
Hiring the wrong salesperson is a very costly mistake. The Association for Talent Development estimates it costs 150% of a salesperson’s annual salary to replace them. It is essential to have a rock-solid hiring process that guarantees that you are hiring salespeople that are A-Players.
How good are the salespeople you already have in place? Have they reached their potential or is there a higher level of performance that needs to be unlocked? What skills need to be developed? Are the salespeople in the right territories? Are your sales manager effective?
2. The sales process?
Highly effective sales teams have a proven sales process in place. They ensure that their salespeople follow the process exactly. This allows them to continually measure how well the process works and quickly discover where the process needs improvement.
As marketing conditions change your sales process will need to be updated. A sales leader’s job is to always be looking for ways to improve the sales process. Data is your friend so measure every aspect of the sales process.
3. Set expectations for salespeople
When you set your expectations, you’re letting your salespeople know exactly what kind of performance you want from them. What activities you want the salespeople to do. How you want them to communicate with clients, with you, and with other departments within your organization.
Expectations allow you to be a more effective coach. You can identify what gets in the way of your salespeople living up to the expectations. Finally, you let the salespeople know what to expect from you as a leader.
4. Relentless prospecting
New clients are the life-blood of any organization. Prospecting needs to be a critical part of every salesperson’s duties. As a sales leader, you have to create a process for prospecting and establish how many first-meetings you want your salespeople to have each week.
When organizations provide sales leads to their salespeople if the deals don’t close quickly then the lead is to blame. Expecting your salespeople to prospect for themselves in addition to the leads keeps them from getting complacent.
Salespeople are warriors, don’t treat them as farmers. Keep their skills sharp.
5. Qualifying sales opportunities
Inaccurate sales pipelines give CEOs nightmares because they can’t make sound business decisions with faulty data. Your salespeople need to have a clear understanding of the stages of the sales process. And how to qualify the prospect so they can accurately place them in the right stage of the sales process.
When sales managers have a more accurate understanding where a prospect is stuck in the sales cycle they can more effectively coach their salespeople. This shortens the sales cycle and increases revenue.
6. Running effective meetings.
Most meetings are a waste of time because a well-crafted email could have brought everyone up to speed without wasting a ton of time. To calculate how much money a meeting truly costs you add the hourly cost of each attendee plus the lost opportunity cost of them not doing their regular work. As a leader, you must ensure that each meeting delivers more value than it costs.
You should have crisp meetings, that add value to you and your sales team. Help them solve problems so they can close deals that were stuck. Keep them in line with their goals so they meet or exceed their sales quota. Motivate them so they leave the meeting on fire ready to conquer the world.
7. Measure sales performance
You have a CRM system use it. Ensure your salespeople are using it because it is part of your sales process. An up to date CRM can provide essential data to let salespeople know where they are in relation to their sales goals. It allows sales leaders to coach their salespeople to stay on track so they hit quota. It highlights which part of the sales process needs improving.
8. Improving sales performance with coaching
Coaching is such an essential part of the sales leader’s job. You need to build a strong relationship so salespeople trust you enough to reveal where they need help and where their fears are creating hesitation.
Coaching should be done around the salesperson’s activity. Are they doing the tasks needed to generate sales? Coaching should not be seen as an encumbrance but as an accelerator, a catalyst to unleash the power that your salespeople have to meet or beat their quota.
9. Celebrate wins
Celebrate the wins with the entire company so you build a culture of sales success. This motivates everyone from frontline works to the people in accounting to do their best so the organization can continue to grow.
A culture of sales success motivates your salespeople to go above and beyond the call of duty not just for themselves but for the entire company that is supporting them to drive their organization forward. Research shows people will do more for their peers than their leaders if the right sales culture is in place.
10. Company-wide meetings
Most people in your organization do not understand what it takes to acquire new customers. They think salespeople are a bunch of prima donnas, that play golf and wine and dine prospects. When everyone in the organization knows the roles and responsibilities of all the departments and the individuals within they realize how everyone is essential to winning new accounts.
This understanding gets people to figure out what they need to do better to help everyone, especially the salespeople do their job more effectively. It also reduces office-politics and promotes interdepartmental collaboration. Company meetings done right strengthens the culture of sales success.
11. Protect your salespeople
It is your job to remove as many distractions so your salespeople get as much time in front of customers as possible. No filling up unnecessary forms to keep accounting happy. Your sales team is the tip of the spear give them what they need to close new business.
12. Build a culture of sales
When the sales team knows that the entire company has it’s back amazing things happen. Salespeople go beyond the call of duty to ensure that they deliver exceptional sales results. They do this because the entire company is counting on them.
What the first 11 ways do is create a culture of sales success within your company. All employees know what the sales department does, and why it’s their responsibility to ensure they have all the tools and services they need to get the job done. This creates one company, with all the departments supporting each other to grow revenue and drive the organization towards success.
If you are using different strategies to increase your sales team’s effectiveness please share them with me in the comments section.
Happy Selling!
