In an age when there’s more competition for customers than ever, your sales team needs as much support and encouragement as possible to ensure they can deliver their best work. In this post, we’ll run through some of the best strategies for getting the most from your sales team.
Review Your Onboarding Process
You can’t expect a sales rep who hasn’t been brought fully up to speed to achieve great results. After all, there’s only so much they can do if they haven’t got the information and training they need to sell well.
A good onboarding process sets sales reps up for success. At a minimum, they should know the product inside out, have clear goals, and understand every stage of the sales process. But you can also take things further, such as by pairing new recruits with an experienced member of the team for their first few weeks and making sure they feel part of both the sales team and the wider company.
Update Your Sales Process
Your company’s sales process is the foundation of your sales team’s success. Given its importance, it’s essential to make sure that the sales process is well put together, in line with modern strategies, and genuinely delivering all that it can for your team and business. All too often, businesses continue working with sales processes that are achieving acceptable results, but not excellent results.
In the sales world, it can pay to set high standards — and sales process optimization is perhaps the easiest and most effective way to elevate those standards. What is sales process optimization, we hear you ask? It’s simply the process of reviewing and refining every facet of your sales cycle to ensure that it’s as efficient and conversion-boosting as possible. By continually reviewing and updating your sales process, you’ll naturally be supporting your sales team because it’ll mean they’ll be utilizing the processes and strategies that are most effective for helping them reach their goals.
Upgrade Sales Tech Stack
The tech your sales team uses can make all the difference to their working processes, allowing them to work more effectively and efficiently than ever before. Ideally, they’ll have a sales tech stack that works in alignment; even if there are various different software tools in the stack, they should work together to provide one all-around effective working process.
If it’s been some time since you last reviewed your sales tech stack, then now could be the time. There’s been a flood of extremely powerful sales tools hitting the market in the past few years, and if your team is still using older tools, then they may not be as well-armed for success as they should be. Just be sure to speak to your team about what tools they want/don’t want; ultimately, they’re the ones who will be using the software, so it’s important that they feel comfortable and happy with the changes.
Provide Ongoing Coaching
There’s a lot of power in quarterly reviews…but there’s also a lot of time between those reviews. If a sales rep is struggling — either knowingly or not — with an aspect of sales, then it makes little sense to wait three months before issues are identified and managed. Even well-performing sales reps can benefit from having check-ins a little more regularly.
Providing ongoing coaching helps to both address any issues before they have time to become habits while also helping to improve a team member’s all-around performance. It doesn’t have to take up a big chunk of the day — even small role-playing-based coaching exercises, call analysis training, and providing real-time feedback during a call can provide small improvements that produce big results.
Get Marketing and Sales in Sync
It’s much easier to achieve success when everything’s pulling in the same direction. That’s true for all departments within your business, but it’s especially relevant to the marketing and sales teams. After all, the work of one (marketing) often influences the work of the other (your sales team).
Getting those two departments on the same page makes everyone’s life easier, including those of your potential customers. Their journey will be smoother when it feels as if their journey from marketing to sales feels like a continuation of the same narrative, rather than like they’re speaking to an entirely new business.
The most effective way to align your marketing and sales teams is to get them working together. They’ll achieve better results if they’re aligned on the ideal customer profile, use the same lead scoring strategies, and set joint goals.
Autonomy and Accountability
Sales employees — like most employees — work best when they have space to do what they do best. Ultimately, the highest-performing employees will be the ones who know that they have the confidence of management to work in their preferred way. If you’ve hired correctly, then you should have a team of sales reps who know exactly how to achieve results, provided they have the right support.
Allowing for a culture of autonomy and accountability can help to turbocharge sales performance, since it allows each individual rep to take ownership of their work while still retaining a sense of teamwork. There’s no single way to create a culture of autonomy. Mostly, it comes down to avoiding micromanaging and providing each team member with the trust, guidance, and support they need to do their best work.
Rewarding Excellent Performance
The best sales reps are intrinsically motivated to do a great job, but they also draw on external motivation. Companies that demonstrate that they’re willing to recognize and reward excellent sales performance can ensure that their team’s motivation is covered on multiple fronts.
Rewards for good performance can come in various forms. The most obvious way to reward good performance is through financial rewards, such as giving bonuses for meeting or exceeding sales goals. In addition, don’t underestimate the power of non-financial recognition, such as awarding a sales rep an award for being the highest performer or including them in company newsletters. That can help boost morale among employees, since it shows that their good performance is being acknowledged by management.
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