Succeeding in sales is vital to a company’s health, among a few other factors. For a sales team to achieve and generate revenue, various things contribute.
From hiring to grooming the sales team, there are tons of areas that require the attention of a Sales team manager. The core strength culture, process, and a few other things contribute towards building a strong Sales team. However, sales are pretty challenging whether you are a fresh sales representative or an experienced one.
Sales meetings, periodic reviews, and daily sales updates are sure to make anyone squirm. If you are struggling to get your sales team to perform better, read on to find the best tips that help sales team management.
Sales managers play a pivotal role in the success of the sales function, thereby contributing to the company’s success.
1 . Train the team
Learning a new skill, refreshing the existing ones, updating knowledge, and receiving insightful coaching from the Sales manager helps contribute to the success of a sales team management.
Time management, listening without prejudice, find solutions for customer issues, and offering regular inputs/ tips to the team are a part of sales team management. The constant change in sales requires the sales team to evolve and adapt to the changes.
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Changes in customer behavior, technology-based changes, new goals, changed sales processes, and techniques are a part of the change. Ensuring your sales team is going through continuous learning is a part of successful sales team management. Training, conference, events, and learning about new technologies enable the sales team to stay updated and perform better.
It is vital to assess the strength and weakness of the sales reps. Identifying courses & workshops to train the team and letting the team attend conferences helps them hone their skills.
Hiring outside consultants to coach the team and utilizing the past data is a great way to understand what works best to enable the sales team to perform better.
2 . Synergy
It is essential to create a balance in the sales team. Sales team management is successful when there is a balance in performance among the team members. If one team member is a rockstar and the remaining are struggling to succeed, it will only lead to multiple issues in the team and, finally, bring down the overall performance.
That is why sharing the best practices, removing the roadblocks, finding solutions to the prevalent challenges faced by the team, and following a robust process is an integral part of sales team management.
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If one sales rep is cracking it consistently, it is evident that they follow some best practices. It is crucial to identify the best practices and ensure that the remaining team members follow them.
While what works for one need not necessarily work for others identifying beneficial process/ practice and coaching the entire team to adhere to them helps manage a sales team.
3. Identify the challenges and find solutions.
The first and foremost need of a successful sales team management involves identifying the existing challenges in the team and finding workable solutions for the same.
Understanding the critical strength and weakness of the current team, balancing the skills while making hiring decisions, identifying training needs, checking for any other challenges that exist is vital for success.
Finding workable options and constantly working on process improvement helps to keep up the motivation of the team. Ensuring a balance between the teams in motivation, performance, and coaching is vital for successful sales team management.
One solution does not fit all when it comes to a sales team. What works well for one person may not work for another. The main reason for this being every sales professional has his/ her strengths and weaknesses. Where one strategy works well, another may not!
4. Accepting Rejection
Constant rejection and hearing a “no’ from customers throughout the day can demotivate anyone. Dealing with rejection by sharing experiences, encouraging each other in the team, and staying rational helps the sales teams avoid getting demoralized.
There is no rockstar sales team. Every team has its weaknesses. However, a good sales team culture, reasonable compensation, prioritizing time management, proper training, and coaching the team to handle rejection helps keep up the sales team enthusiasm.
Just like celebrating success, accepting rejection and identifying the root cause would be helpful to normalize and find the reason behind the failure. Collecting data about identifying what went wrong in the process and at what stage the rejection took place helps improve and learn from past failures.
Hubspot research suggests that 72% of companies with less than fifty new opportunities per month seem to have not achieved their revenue goals. Rejections happen at various stages.
Some sales personnel fail at the final stage, and a few others seem to face rejection at first few times they call and try to establish a relationship with potential customers. As per a study, sales reps face a no from 60% of the customers before saying yes.
5. A Motivational Compensation Plan
While there are tons of methods to uplift the motivation of a team, nothing works like a compensation plan.
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Commission, rewards, awards, and accolades are a few methods of appreciating a sales rep’s hard work and excellent performance. Adequate salary, attractive incentives, and commission on sales are beneficial to attract and retain sales professionals.
It can be tough to keep oneself motivated with ongoing rejections daily. Monetary benefits enable sales reps to stay motivated and helps to keep their morale boosted.
Conclusion
There are tons of tips to help keep the sales team motivated and successful. However, practising active listening, empathizing with the customer, providing ample training/coaching to the sales team, and rehearsing to manage rejections helps in achieving success.
Brainstorming solutions to potential challenges and utilizing technology for a higher success rate are a few ways of ensuring that the sales team stays successful and motivated.
Successful sales team management is not possible to achieve overnight. Well-calculated hiring decisions enables to emphasize balancing the talent within the team.
Employing the best retention policies, training/ coaching the team as per their strengths/ weaknesses, allowing the team to utilize the social media channels and using attractive compensation policies are a few tricks to ensure successful sales team management.
