No matter your experience in the business industry, it’s never easy to manage a sales team. Although it may require small efforts, successful sales team management needs commitment and dedication. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to manage a sales team effectively.
However, it’s essential to remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for every sales team. The right approach often depends on your business’s sales process, goals, and other aspects. But there are common ways to help you manage your sales team and get your desired results. Read this practical guide to know more.
- Use The Right Tools
Regardless of the effort you put into your sales team, skills may only take your salespeople so far. Without the right tools, your sales reps won’t perform well and may not maximize their abilities, no matter how dedicated they are.
To ensure it won’t happen, provide your sales team with the right tools to benefit from power dialling, and keep your company abreast with new technological developments that can take your sales to a new level. If you want to select the right tools for your business, keep the following tips in mind:
- Evaluate your sales pipeline to spot opportunities for scaling or improvement.
- Understand your sales process.
- Know which processes take up the most time and whether you can automate them.
- Talk to various departments.
- Talk to your employees to know what should be optimized.
There are other things you must consider when looking for the right tools, such as Drop Cowboy ringless voicemail and text, especially for your voicemail needs. If you want to make the most out of such tools, they must be easy to use so your sales team can quickly utilize them properly.
- Define Your Goals
Your sales team should be passionate enough to achieve their limits and deliver the best possible output. To make this happen, your sales goals should be set accordingly.
Setting such goals should be achievable and realistic so your sales reps don’t get discouraged when they miss the targets. To ensure a perfect balance, you may go with Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely (SMART) goals. Once you define your goals, you can quickly manage your sales team while reaching your targets.
- Create A Straightforward Sales Process
Aside from using the right tools like a business dialing platform, another way to effectively manage a sales team is to provide your salespeople with a straightforward process. It’ll help them to focus more energy and time on core activities that drive revenue. Aside from that, it provides your sales team with a clear structure to follow when performing various sales activities.
To establish a sales process, it must outline the following:
- Crucial stages of your sales pipeline
- Structured lead qualification criteria matched to your sales pipeline stages
- Activities the sales team must be doing at every stage
- Goals for individual reps and teams
An efficient and straightforward sales process is critical for any business. To ensure consistency, it must be easy to follow.
This way, your new hires can quickly jump into their work and know the activities they need to complete to hit the revenue targets. It should also stay consistent since you’re measuring progress across various sales teams and tracking everybody’s performance, which provides an opportunity to determine your high-performing teams.
- Respect Every Sales Team Member
As a business owner or sales manager, don’t be afraid to be honest when you make mistakes, even though you use data right and strategically to make sales decisions. You must act as a leader, but never forget to learn from your own mistakes. Avoid getting angry when you miss sales goals or lose deals. Instead, analyze your mistakes and learn from them. Then share what you’ve learned with your team.
Like anyone else, your sales team members are struggling and doing their best to reach their targets. So respect and understand them. If you want them to understand you, listen to them and prioritize communication to manage your sales team effectively.
- Define Your Sales Team Structure
You need an efficient team structure if you have several sales teams in different regions. With this, you can create a team dynamic that encourages consistency and efficiency across your company.
There are different types of team structures, and these include the following:
- Pod Structure—It involves creating different self-contained pod teams.
- Assembly Line Structure—A modern team structure in which every sales rep focuses on a pipeline stage, establishing specialized groups.
- Island Structure—It’s a traditional sales team structure in which every sales team member serves as a full-cycle manager responsible for their own prospecting, lead generation, follow-ups, outreach, and closing.
The team structure you select will depend on the format and size of your teams and the specific roles of the reps. For example, an assembly line structure is an excellent option if you want to drive effective and fast growth; it’s highly scalable.
- Encourage Continued Learning
If you help your sales teams start off on the right foot with training, you’ll be able to achieve your target goals successfully. So encourage continued learning by getting your comprehensive sales training in place.
It’s vital to train your sales team members regularly to keep them up-to-date with the latest trends in sales. A good sales management strategy to help you do this is establishing a strategic training plan for each year and ensuring your sales team sticks to it. Training must reinforce previously taught lessons and add new strategies to build their skill set.
- Nurture Your Sales Team With The Best Habits
Compared to other jobs, sales require special skills and habits that every sales team member must possess. The best salesperson isn’t the one who makes hundreds of phone calls, attends countless meetings, and manages many leads to produce minimal customers.
Good salespeople are the ones who can steal the spotlight of the entire sales team by following a set of habits and techniques instead of taking up massive numbers. So if you want to manage your sales effectively, nurture those sellable methods to your team and make them a habit among them.
- Invest In Culture
Each business is defined by its culture. However, the best businesses are the ones that focus on how their culture impacts their sales team and other workers. Therefore, if you want to achieve effective sales management, you must prioritize culture.
Unfortunately, most people struggle with what makes a great sales culture. Since it’s a vague concept, measuring culture as you do with conversions, opportunities, and sales volume is impossible. Creating a high-performing sales culture should consist of the following:
- Mentorship, respect, and integrity
- Recognition and praise
- Proactive communication
- Constant feedback loops
- Passion and enthusiasm
- Guided autonomy and self-accountability
- Incentivizing compensation and fair awards
- No trash-talking and consistent underperformance
As a sales manager, you should be consistent and cautious in enforcing the above. Never make concessions for sales reps. But instead, understand how damaging it might be for the culture.
- Have Communication Channels
Your sales team deals with services that require consistent help from your backend service team. It ensures that whatever they’re onboarding is something that they’re confident to deliver and aren’t overcommitting to customers.
For this reason, have communication channels across every team that will help your sales team close deals faster and reduce potential errors. Therefore, if your sales reps communicate on several channels, you have to sort such things out and ensure they get in touch with one another on the right platforms.
- Inspire Your Team
Every successful sales team manager understands the significance of inspiring their team. So use inspiration as one of your strategies when managing a sales team. You can do this by helping every sales rep see how successful they can be and motivating them to unleash their full potential.
You can also be an inspiring sales team manager by
- Always telling the truth to your customers and coworkers.
- Showing gratitude for your sales rep’s hard work and recognizing it.
- Taking personal responsibility for what happens even when some consequences are unpleasant.
- Having an uplifting and positive attitude that’s contagious.
- Caring about the success of your sales team more than your personal gains.
Creating a workplace environment in which your sales team feels inspired will help motivate them to excel at their work. If you’re effectively inspiring your sales teams, they’ll become more productive, resulting in greater revenues and better sales results.
- Pay Attention Into Onboarding New Hires
Lousy onboarding may lead to underperforming sales reps. On the other hand, good onboarding may turn somebody average into a seasoned sales expert.
Improper onboarding may make new hires feel lost and need clarification or guidance about their responsibilities or roles. They’re detached and left out from the rest of your sales team and company. Therefore, during the first few weeks of your onboarding process, you must try to
- Introduce new hires to your company culture.
- Build rapport with new hires.
- Ensure they understand each part of your team structure and sales cycle.
- Explain your audience to your new hires, introduce them to buyer personas, and point out common pain points.
- Familiarize your new hires with your product’s intricacies. If possible, allow them to use your products, give them details about what differentiates you from others, and let them learn about your product’s use cases.
- Help them become familiar with your company’s information through case studies, goals and objectives, marketing materials, and mission statements.
These are some things you can do as you onboard your new hires. Paying extra care to your onboarding process won’t only help your new hires do their job well. But it won’t also give you a tough time managing your sales team in the long run.
- Measure Your Sales Team’s Performance, And Address Gaps
The best way to know you’re doing a great job managing your sales team is by measuring your sales rep’s performance. There are several metrics you can consider, such as the following:
- Close rate
- Cost per lead
- Time spent selling
- Customer lifetime value
- Lead response time
If the sales rep isn’t quite at your expected level, determine the cause. Sometimes, it has something to do with the following:
- Skills Or Knowledge: Does your sales rep have limited experience or skill? If so, an excellent solution is to pair them with more knowledgeable and experienced sales reps.
- Motivation: Does your sales rep often feel understimulated or overwhelmed? Are they struggling with staying motivated and happy at work? Regardless of the reasons, do your best to motivate your sales team. For example, you can create a reward system to encourage them to improve.
- Resource Access: Is your sales team struggling with outdated devices or unfamiliar software solutions? If your company has obsolete technology, consider upgrading it to fill the gap and help your sales team to achieve more.
Measuring your sales rep’s performance regularly and addressing the gaps immediately can help you maximize your sales team’s performance. You don’t need to provide your sales team with anything fancy. Sometimes, even minor improvements like upgrading your technology can help them stay motivated and do their best at work.
- Incentivize Your Sales Team
Paying your sales team for the work they’re doing isn’t enough. Even if they try their best to do their job for their salary, they’ll be delighted with bonuses or incentives. These may also push the boundaries for salespeople, making them go for more prospects and deals. So be sure to incentivize your sales team consistently.
You can incentivize your sales team by recognizing their hard work with the following meaningful gifts:
- Team bonuses
- Layered compensation structure
- Activity-based sales incentives
With a better reward and compensation model, you’ll motivate your sales team to achieve more. To determine the best compensation structure for your salespeople, ask for help from your sales operations manager to align your organization’s strategic needs with a payment structure that rewards and motivates your most effective team members.
Conclusion
Your sales team is the key to reaching your revenue targets and earning more profits. You can’t guarantee results if you don’t know how to manage your sales team properly. So use the above guide to manage your salespeople effectively, and don’t forget to experiment with various strategies that will benefit your business and sales team in the future.
