Building, managing, and leading a sales team is one of the toughest jobs on planet Earth. But it is also one of the most rewarding ones. As the leader, you’ll be putting in a lot of mental, physical, and emotional effort. And if you do it right, you’ll receive huge rewards in the form of an easy-to-manage skilled sales army (which is truly an asset in the present-day saturated market). Plus, the profits will be sky-high. Your company will be truly unstoppable even if you’re offering an average or mediocre product or service.
In this guide, we’ll share 8 tips that can help you manage your sales team more effectively. Along with each tip, we’ll also share how you can implement it.
Optimize your On-boarding Process
You cannot onboard limited minds and force them to expand while they work with you. You need to opt for individuals who are looking forward to learning and growing.
When hiring candidates, make sure you look beyond their academics and experience. Assess the individual for their intelligence quotient, emotional quotient, and behavioral quotient. You need to assess these because your sales team will be interacting with your customers. Oftentimes, they’ll have to deal with situations wherein they’ll have to make their own decisions to close the deal. They should be capable of changing their strategies, adapting to the customer’s behavior and psyche, and being open to criticism.
Continually Upgrade Skill Set
The sales industry evolves phenomenally. In 2021, the prime sales strategy was to amplify your customers’ needs. You had to be vocal about their needs, which automatically brought your product/service into sight. In 2022, the prime sales strategy is to amplify your uniqueness as a product-selling or service-selling business.
In lieu of sales strategy and sales, the requirement for sales skills continues to evolve too. So, it’s best you evaluate your team on a monthly basis, identify skill gaps between your employees (internally and in comparison, to the external market), and train them. You can arrange workshops and training sessions led by seniors in your firm or experts in the field.
Make Communication Easier
A lot of sales teams become too toxic to be a part of because of the jealousy and ego factor that prevails. Leaders become too addicted to authority and power. Consequently, they begin imposing their will on the juniors and do not pay heed to how they feel or think about the sales process. We recommend eliminating such factors by ensuring smooth communication between the team members.
You can arrange regular stand-ups and ask for everyone’s suggestions and opinions about the ongoing processes instead of only asking for reports. You can also arrange team-bonding activities within work hours to make communication easier amongst teammates. Leaders should ensure their speech and tones are professional and polite. One of the best ways to improve communication within a team is to provide 360-degree feedback. This type of feedback allows team members to give and receive feedback from all sides, not just from their direct supervisor. This way, team members can get a more well-rounded view of how they’re performing and where they can improve.
Motivate with Incentives
Offering incentives is an excellent way to boost productivity within your sales team. It boosts morale and gives them a sense of progress and achievement. You can offer incentives in the following ways:
- Rewards & Recognition
- Bonuses
- Profit-sharing
- Commissions
- Tuition reimbursements
- Gifts that benefit employees (such as car, house, or insurance)
If your company cannot offer much to the employees at the moment, you can offer free lunches and dinners.
Create a Healthy Competition
Positive competition within your sales team can improve your sales dramatically. It will push the employees to be more creative and broaden their horizons. Their spirit to ace the project will bring in greater enthusiasm and engagement. But how can you create healthy competition within your team? You can do so by:
- Appreciating and congratulating employees for small wins publicly
- Offering non-monetary gifts and rewards
- Develop and promote departmental contests
- Arranging brainstorming sessions
- Engaging in creative activities as a team together (for example video recording or skit performance)
Know them Personally
You cannot bring out the best in your team if you do not know each individual in your team personally. When your team is working, make sure you visit their desk and chat a bit about their work procedures. Do not get too noisy and show up more than once every day. Instead, show up occasionally but when you do, ask about their progress, their struggles, and if you could help them out with something. It would create a comfortable space and you’ll learn about their strengths and weaknesses.
If you work remotely, you can arrange a 1:1 session with them every Monday or so. Stay connected with them via DMs and make it a point to ask about their personal engagements and life once in a while. Do not push them to share the details with you. But let them know that you’re there to listen and understand their situation if there’s ever a need.
Use Modern Sales Tools
It is also a good idea to monitor the performance of your sales team using modern sales tools like salesforce Google analytics. Modern sales tools can also help you upgrade and improve the performance of your sales team based on data. You can develop a data-backed strategy and implement it for guaranteed results.
Educate about Competitors
The best way to land your sales team in the best sales team of your respective industry is to know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. It is wrong of you to expect your employees to invest time studying your competitors and performing accordingly. Instead, you can regularly share updates in meetings, or you can distribute essential information to your employees via email or brochures. Let them know things they’ve to notice and counter. Encourage them to share their learnings and ideas. Collectively, you can come up with more effective and innovative solutions.
Final Thoughts
Along with implementing the tips suggested above, we recommend being very specific with your feedback. Give a detailed breakdown of what you liked, what you disliked, and what you’d like them to improve. Simultaneously, it’s a good idea to evaluate your performance in a similar manner. It’ll help the team improve in general.
