Even if you have a super solid product, you won’t make any stable revenue if you lack a solid sales team. The sales team is literally your business’s heart.
These skilled sales individuals:
- Identify and approach target customers
- Communicate or create the need for your product
- Convert potential leads into returning customers
They initiate the generation of revenue. Your product will retain the revenue if it’s good enough. If your product or service is not good enough, you might have to work extra hard on leveling up the performance of your sales team.
In this post, we’ll share how you can do it. Whether you’ve got an established sales team or you’re creating a team from scratch, the strategies in this guide will be useful for all.
Let’s get started!
What counts as Sales Team Performance?
By definition, sales team performance refers to the sales generated against the set expectations. If you’ve set up a goal for selling three units in the month, a good sales team performance would mean three of your products are sold within the same month.
An excellent team performance would mean 3+ units are sold. However, poor sales team performance would mean below three or no sales at all.
How to measure Sales Team Performance?
For measuring sales team performance, you need to have goals in the first place. It’s a good idea to discuss and determine these with your team before you set them up. It’ll give you a realistic insight into what’s achievable and what isn’t.
Here are a few things you can measure to track sales efficiency:
- Total revenue
- Revenue per product/customer
- Positioning
- Year-over-year growth
- Lifetime Value of a Customer
- Quota attainment
- Pipeline coverage
You may analyze only a select few or more. It depends on your business module.
10 Ways to Maximize Your Sales Team’s Performance
#1. Train & Coach Frequently
When you hire sales representatives, make sure you give them a thorough week-long training session to adapt to your system.
Most companies save budgets and avoid hiring dedicated onboarding trainers. This, in turn, leads to poor sales and performance.
The new hires may not be able to pick useful things from observing seniors. Hence, it’s best you hire dedicated trainers and allow them to adjust to your environment as required.
We also recommend arranging occasional coaching sessions for senior employees to upgrade their skill sets, boost morale, and improve sales performance.
#2. Know Your Team
You cannot bring the best out of your team if you do not know them individually. Conduct 1:1 meetings with all your employees every Monday or by the end of the week. Check out their individual progress for the week and analyze their strengths and weaknesses.
If a sales rep is constantly going downhill with a particular task, it’s highly likely they are facing a problem and are unable to overcome it. Help them find the problem and solve it together if possible. In case you don’t see a practical solution to the problem, relocate them to another department, team, or client.
Alternatively, you can use latest training tools like Wonderway sales performance platform. Tools like these can save you the hassle of changing your team all over again. Instead, they can help you bridge the skills gap in your sales reps.
We encourage getting to know your team personally. Do not ask questions that make them uncomfortable. But keep a check on their health and mood. It determines the work momentum.
Once you know everybody, structure the team to dedicate specific skills to a specific time.
#3. Acknowledge Wins
Your team will have a lot of tough time improving every single day. They won’t be able to close each lead despite implementing the entire 7-step sales process. It could lower their stamina, motivation, and dedication toward work.
We recommend tackling this by celebrating each small win. If the sales rep got the client to subscribe for the month, give your employee a bonus for the month! Or recognize their efforts in a team meeting or with some honorary gifts. It will become their fuel to do more.
#4. Give Actionable Feedback
Sales Team leads and managers often lead fantastic individuals because they fail to communicate the problem. Just telling your team whether you’re satisfied or not isn’t good enough. It’ll leave your teammates frustrated and hateful.
Hence, work on improving your communication skills. First, compliment their efforts. And next, highlight the problem as gently as possible. Explain how the problem can be avoided and request them to keep it in mind in the future.
Be sure to take a natural take at it. Otherwise, it may lose its impact. Also, avoid micromanaging your employees. Encourage creativity, leadership, and risk-taking.
#5. Build Systems
You cannot achieve much if you try a new strategy every day. Hence, dedicate some time to determine how things will work around the team or your office. Determine roles and responsibilities and set a bar for expectations.
It’s alright to be slightly flexible and permit your employees to make changes as need be. But it’s not okay to let them redo the strategy and make major business decisions.
Once you have the framework devised, set up a schedule. Get into a routine. Practice as much as you can, you’ll improve along the way!
#6. Use Modern Sales Tools
If you’re selling online, your team needs to be well-versed in modern sales tools. These will help automate a lot of redundant, manual tasks and save human effort. You can invest this human effort into other areas, such as creativity and interaction with customers to achieve better results.
Here are a few modern sales tools that we recommend:
- Google Analytics
- Salesflare
- Loom
- Sender
- Demodesk
- Userlike
- Camo
Tools like analytics help monitor the traffic, retention, and effectiveness of implemented strategies. They give you numbers to analyze your business. With Salesforce Google Analytics integration, you can use this information to improve your sales and campaign strategies.
But tools loom and camo makes working and collaboration easier for your sales team. Since a lot of processes are integrated with one another, they can communicate conveniently.
We suggest exploring more modern sales tools since incorporating tech in your sales processes can improve time management by 10x.
#7. Bring in industry-oriented minds
It doesn’t matter if someone has three years of experience on their resume. If they do not have enough drive and passion for the job, they won’t do you much good.
So, when hiring analyze the following:
- Industry knowledge
- Future work-relevant plans
- Previous struggles and capability to overcome
Don’t just hire based on academics and experience. Determine how excited they are to come to the office. Instill a love for work and progress in your current team with social and personal growth.
#8. Improve and centralize focus
It’s common for the sales team to get excited and lose track of specific goals and missions. Hence, one of the best ways to maximize your sales team performance is to work on improving focus. Here are some ways to do it:
- Get punctual with morning and evening standups. If you have a small team, weekly standups are fine.
- Every quarter, schedule a special meeting wherein you discuss your sales learning for the quarter and your team pools in the lessons they learned.
- Celebrate big and small wins appropriately. Don’t let things go unnoticed and unrecognized.
- Do not disturb your employees with work notifications and reminders during breaks. Let them roam free.
#9. Work on Customer Experience
If you have a SaaS tool, you should know there are over a hundred competitors already for your specific niche. The same applies to other industries and products.
After the pandemic, a lot of people have left their jobs and have jumped into the business. Every other nook and corner around here is already packed.
So, what do you do? How do you stand out and generate more sales than your competitors?
Work on your customer experience. Narrow down your sales funnel to each individual customer and watch the magic happen. Here are a few things you can do to excel:
- Do not send out bulk emails. Instead, customize them for the user’s needs.
- Do not cold call without any homework. Know who you’re talking to and centralize your sales around their pain points.
- Educate your audience and help them make informed decisions.
Make their experience as butter smooth as possible.
Suggested Read: 5 Unique Strategies to Make a Place in Niche Market
#10. Revisit the Products
The sales industry has witnessed this a lot of times. The sales team does everything in its capacity to sell the product or service but there’s no retention at all.
Why is that so?
It’s because there’s something wrong with the product or service. Perhaps, your pricing is way higher than competitors. Or maybe, you fail to deliver the experience customers desire.
Get in touch with the customers leaving you and ask them why they’re leaving. Your customers will give you the best feedback. Use it to enhance your product and get your sales team working again.
Final Words
It will take a bit of homework to maximize your sales team’s performance. But once you do it, you will see things falling into place. You will witness your company blooming in six months’ time if all goes well. Good luck!
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