Sales are no easy gig – given the increased pressure and continuous rejection, it’s easy to understand why salespeople have a hard time hitting their targets. The good news is that you can boost your sales’ team performance, and the first step in doing so is to identify what goes wrong in the first place. There may be different reasons, including a lack of clarity regarding goals, an ineffective sales process and technology, poorly qualified leads, a lack of adequate customer data, and so on. Hence, it’s essential to take the time to figure out which factors prevent your team from hitting its goals, and once you do so, you can put together a plan to generate better results.
Let’s take a look at the best strategies to empower your sales team.
Set clear goals
The first step in ensuring a successful sales performance is to let your sales team know right from the beginning what you expect from them. Setting goals can be a challenging task for sales managers, as they need to consider several factors. Plus, it is essential to ensure the goals are achievable and realistic – otherwise, you will only set your sales team up for failure. When setting goals, you should begin by considering the direction where you want to get, as it is essential in making the right decisions. Just make sure that your goals are aligned with your company’s mission.
Ideally, you should use the SMART methodology to ensure you’re on the right path. That means being as specific as possible when setting goals and making sure they are quantifiable, attainable, time-bound, and, of course, relevant to your business. Once you set goals for the entire team, the next step is to assign them individually based on your reps’ abilities. Let’s say one of your goals is to boost profits by 20% in one year. In this case, you can assign each team member the goal of enhancing the earnings by 5% each quarter.
Identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses
One of the best ways to increase your team’s sales is to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each individual. Perhaps some reps do an excellent job when it comes to prospecting but can’t handle closing effectively. Others may have difficulty moving deals through the pipeline, and so on. Whatever these areas of weakness are, it is essential to identify them so that you can create an effective plan to solve the problem.
Moreover, setting realistic expectations with your team members is key – suppose a rep excels at prospecting but doesn’t perform so well at closing. In this case, it would be unrealistic to expect they will close the same number of deals as another rep with better performance in that area. What you want to do is focus on everyone’s strengths and weaknesses and help them in those areas where they struggle.
Commit to your team’s development
No matter how skilled your sales team is, investing in their development is vital, as this will help ensure they will be more effective in their roles. You need to provide your reps with the right opportunities, such as attending a sales conference where keynote speakers on collaboration share efficient tools for innovation and teach them how to harness their uniqueness and build connections with customers to grow sales. For instance, your sales team can learn about storytelling and its major impact on building trust among prospects and motivating them to buy the company’s products. Stories can stir emotions, which can play a considerable role in customers’ purchasing decisions, so taking advantage of this powerful sales tool makes sense.
Enhancing your sales team skills will be a crucial differentiator in a competitive environment. Any successful sales organization needs to be data and tech-fluent and possess excellent relationship-building skills. Therefore, it is essential to empower your sales team with all the resources they need to carry out their work-related tasks effectively. To this end, you can implement a sales training program, whether online or in-person, covering all the fundamentals of selling, from the prospecting part to the closing one.
Offer adequate sales tools
In their effort to enhance their sales team performance, many companies have implemented several tools. Unfortunately, such an initiative leads to more problems than solutions because more disconnected systems create workflow bottlenecks and data silos. This only frustrates your workforce, as they spend a lot of their time switching between multiple apps to complete their tasks, leading to the loss of valuable data.
Instead of this, companies should adopt a more strategic approach, integrating powerful tools within their current systems. For instance, sales engagement platforms can boost a team’s workflow across disparate tools like emails, CRM, and so on. This is because they ensure seamless communication between reps and prospects, enabling the former to personalize their messages and simultaneously track their results.
Provide tailored feedback
When providing feedback to your team, you should personalize it – not only in terms of content but also in the way you deliver your message. Your reps are all unique individuals, meaning they will react differently to a specific type of feedback. For instance, while constructive criticism may help some reps make improvements, other team members may prefer a softer approach.
Therefore, it is essential to determine how each of your reps prefers to get feedback from you so that you can tailor it accordingly. Personalizing feedback is a way to show your sales team that you can go the extra mile to help them improve their performance, and at the same time, it allows them to know that they are valued.
The bottom line
Improving your sales team performance can feel daunting, but these tips will make it easier to navigate the process. Remember to focus on the growth of your reps, have clear goals for your company, and make sure team members have all the tools they need to work towards your business’ objectives. If you do all these things, there is no doubt your sales team will succeed.
