Thorough Training
The Right Person for the Job
A large part of making sure your sales team is working like a well-oiled machine is making sure you’ve got the right sales professionals in the right roles. Instead of hiring an exceptional sales professional and asking him or her to do a little bit of everything, focus their position so that they can use their strengths efficiently.
If a sales rep excels at prospecting, put them in a sales development role so that they can generate large numbers of leads. Likewise, if you’ve got someone on your team who is particularly skilled at closing, put them in a position to do what they do best.
Effective Onboarding
In addition to hiring the right people for the right roles, pay special attention to your company’s onboarding process. It may be tempting to let a newly hired sales rep loose right away, especially if they’re highly qualified, but providing direction is a much better course of action.
In order to work efficiently as soon as possible, a new hire needs to get acquainted with your specific sales process, no matter how experienced they are. Save time by structuring an onboarding process that outlines specific responsibilities and expectations for employees during their first months with your company.
How many deals do your sales reps generally handle a month?
How big are the deals on average?
And how long is the sales cycle?
Having the answers to these questions as soon as possible will let your sales reps know what to expect right away. They’ll have more confidence and will feel more involved.
Also, keep communications open with newly hired sales reps. Offer feedback on their performance and even ask for feedback from them regarding the onboarding process.
Thorough processes for recruiting, hiring and onboarding are the building blocks of high-performing teams. Consider expert guidance in getting your company’s processes where they need to be.
Smart Goal Setting
Look to Your Sales Process
A second factor of leading a high performing sales team is goal setting, which incorporates sales process and the importance of selling value.
We’ve looked at the many benefits of defining a sales process before and what it looks like. An intelligent sales process outlines the journey your customer takes from initial discovery to close and offers insights to the efficacy of your sales team. More importantly, the sales process should also inform the actions your sales team takes along the customer journey.
Use your sales process to track what’s working well and what’s not. How many cold-calls is it taking to generate qualified leads? Use this information to help set effective goals for your sales reps and refine the process if necessary.
Sell Value
While using your sales process as a guide, every team member should have the value of what they offer customers in mind always.
This is something the best sales reps out there already know, and it’s something your entire sales team should focus on. Communicating the value of your product or service means paying extra attention to the benefits it offers the customer, more so than its features.
To do this well, your sales team must understand how your product or service addresses the wants and needs of the customer. As such, it requires a thorough understanding of your company’s offer as well as the target customer. Some companies have found success by developing “battle cards.” These match up features and benefits with each buyer persona they are selling to. Developing this kind of understanding takes time, but it’s well worth it.
Strong Leadership
Create a Coaching Culture
What’s one of the most common attributes of high-performance sales reps?
Experience. Your more experienced reps have had time to deal with the most common pain points that customers face, and they know how to address them. There’s no sense in keeping this knowledge secret. By sharing the war stories and successes of your most experienced team members you can empower the entire team.
Becoming a skilled and top-performing sales professional takes time. It’s like any other pursuit; it takes time and hard work to grow into an expert in the field. You can make this process more efficient by nurturing a sales culture that encourages coaching from sales leaders. Use the great resource that is your own sales team to level up your sales endeavors.
Hold Your Team Accountable
Accountability plays a very important role in how successful your sales team is. Feedback that measures how well your sales professionals are performing provides motivation for your team and important information to guide sales managers. This is where metrics come into play.
Using the right metrics is important. Using too many can lead to analysis paralysis or a tendency to micromanage. And choosing the wrong metrics to focus on can lead your sales team in the wrong direction.
In deciding which metrics your sales team should be watching for accountability, refer back to your sales process. It should be able to help you identify the data that’s most central to your sales team’s success and help hold them accountable.
Start as far upstream as possible from your close – and note the key metrics needed to advance from one stage in your sales process to the next. Core sales metrics like lead response time and lead conversion rates are a good place to start.
Create High Performing Sales Teams
The best sales organizations combine effective training, efficient processes and goals, and a cultivated sales culture. It isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes the right people and strong and effective leadership to make it happen.
Does your sales team have great sales leaders that are successful? If you want to step up the leadership in your sales team, it may be the right time to enlist professional help.
Want to make sure your company performs as well as possible? There’s little that will help more than fostering high performing sales teams. As we close another year, taking the time to evaluate your sales efforts and make the necessary changes could be the best thing you do for your business next year.
We Can Help Your Sales Team
To expedite meeting and exceeding your sales goals, it might be time to call in reinforcements. Schedule your free consultation here to find out how we help sales teams break sales records.