A profession in sales is tricky. While it is grueling to convince customers and get rejected daily, managing a team of sales professionals can be even more challenging, especially when it involves a team of sales reps with different performance challenges.
Missed sales quota, turnover in the team, retention plans, sales strategies, Competition, and many other factors are a part of the sales team management strategies.
The study suggests that more than 57% of sellers failed to achieve their sales quota in 2019.
The team’s underperformance, competitiveness, incentive plans, sales quotas, and other factors contribute to designing sales team management strategies.
While a whopping 35% is the average turnover rate of sales teams in a given financial year.
It is also noteworthy to consider that the cost to hire fresh employees is two times higher than to retain the existing ones. So the question is, how should a sales manager achieve 100% success with Sales Team Management Strategies. While successfully leading a sales team involves:
- Various factors like job satisfaction of the team.
- Improving the company’s revenue.
- Increasing productivity/ performance of the team.
- Constantly working towards improving the sales process.
Let us look at a few guidelines/ Sales Team Management Strategies that a sales manager can follow to succeed.
1. Set the targets
While it is an easy enough concept, setting the right target/ sales goal is also an art. Because set too high, you end up frustrating the team and set too low, and the organization’s overall revenue plummet.
That is why sales targets are achievable based on the team’s capabilities and market research analytics to achieve possible, realistic results continually. It is vital to follow an excellent balance of SMART goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time to achieve a well-balanced sales quota.
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It means particular goals to achieve the tangible target and quantifiable goals to keep track of the progress are vital for the sales team’s success. The attainable goals to ensure the team does not get discouraged, relevant goals align with the company objectives, and finally timely so that the sales team can achieve them well within the timeframe.
2. Assignment of Roles And Responsibilities
While it is easy to assume that sales teams usually have a process and the team follows it to achieve success, the fact is that there are tons of small and significant activities that form a sales process.
Therefore, the team members need to know their roles with a set target to achieve them accordingly. However, assigning job responsibilities based on their strengths and weaknesses to achieve them with all their commitment and capabilities.
3. Onboarding Process
Often, companies fail to recognize the importance of the onboarding process.
While paperwork, training, and an introduction to the existing team members is a vital part of the onboarding plan, it is equally critical to induct the new sales team reps to train them to understand the importance of following the sales process and its role in a scalable environment.
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In addition, a constant improvement of the onboarding process also helps the new sales reps better understand the company’s products, processes, overall objectives, and key selling points so that they can face the customers with an excellent knowledge base and confidence.
4. Sales Process
The first part of creating a successful sales team is through an effective and efficient sales system and process that can support scalability.
A systematic approach helps increase margins and ensures that the steps are clearly defined, with measurable goals, predictable customer behavior, and an overall improvement in productivity and revenue.
In addition, a well-defined sales process usually makes it easy for a new sales rep to follow the process and achieve their targets without a lot of stressful and failed attempts at selling.
Therefore, the sales process plays a vital role in successfully forming efficient and effective Sales Team Management Strategies.
5. Understand Your Sales Team’s Differences
Sales team reps are the strong pillars of support for every organization. And there is much achievement and success available with the team working like a well-oiled machine.
However, a typical sales team mixes people from all walks of life, challenging them to achieve the targeted goals. Therefore, the sales manager must find the differences between the team members and helps them overcome their issues, and work in unison to complete the assigned targets and grow as individuals.
6. Drive Competition
Transparency is the key, whether it is with your internal customer or external ones. Metrics help to identify the performance capabilities of the team and build a competitive environment within the team without spoiling the interpersonal team relationships.
Driving numbers with healthy Competition and rewarding the best performance is one of the best Sales Team Management Strategies of all time.
7. Sales CRM
While selling is the critical role of every sales personnel study, sales reps spend only 35% of their time on actual selling, and that the remaining time occupies the other repetitive tasks that are a part of the process.
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These mundane tasks neither directly contribute towards boosting the revenue nor help to improve the sales funnel. That is why good Sales Team Management Strategies include a Sales CRM that ensures to take away a lot of repetitive tasks from the hands of the sales reps.
It enables them to focus on an essential part of their job, building strong relationships with the customers and improve the sales numbers.
8. Metrics And KPIs
Through analytics, it is easier to predict customer behavior. However, most other factors like the changing trends, natural disasters that drive them, and others cannot be under control.
That is why sales metrics are helpful to set KPIs like cold calls to be made per day, number of follow-ups required, number of leads generated per head, number of in-person meetings scheduled, and a few other factors.
These KPIs help the team break the humongous target into small achievable goals and remove all roles and responsibilities.
9. Incentivize Your Team
Incentives, commission and rewards system is the quickest form of performance booster in every organization.
A commission per sale, incentive for achieving targets per month, and a monetary rewards system paid at the achievement of sales/ revenue target are among the most popular methods of motivating the team by tying it to performance.
While it directly contributes to goal achievement, it is also one of the best ways of managing a highly successful team by rewarding their hard work and boosting their morale.
10. Prioritize Team Retention
While it seems like an easy task to fire an underperformer, it is vital to understand the cost and efforts required to hire a new sales rep, induct, and train them into the system.
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In addition, a sales manager needs to understand the team’s challenges through a regular feedback system, identifying the training needs, motivating the team, building the team spirit, and providing an attractive incentive plan to ensure a lower turnover.
Conclusion
Managing a sales team is challenging enough; adding to it the problem of ensuring the team stays motivated, achieves its targets, keeps the Competition, and generates a steady revenue can be even more difficult.
However, a transparent system, a good sales CRM, sales metrics, healthy Competition within the team, an excellent sales process, setting achievable targets, a stellar onboarding plan, and a few other Sales Team Management Strategies that significantly contribute to the success of a sales team.
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