Running day-to-day operations and accomplishing your goals, like most sales managers, is a real struggle. To begin, you gotta hire the proper salesperson. Then double-check that new staff is adequately trained, performing well, and reporting data accurately. In the midst of it all, you need to make sure you have the necessary sales tools and techniques in place to guarantee your inside sales team functions well.
So, if you’re in charge of a sales team, how can you find time to breathe while still ensuring that your team is productive and efficient? Most of the salespeople would instead do something else than work on the sales floor. As a result, finding qualified individuals is only half the struggle. On the other hand, sales managers must manage their teams to establish a great sales environment, meet quotas, and grow revenue. Managers must remain objective, conduct exploratory discussions, and think outside of the box. Below we unfold the five strategies for managing the high-performance of the sales team.
Create a successful onboarding and training program
This is the most essential step of the process, and it’s what the success of your inside sales team depends on. You may have chosen the best applicant for the job, but if you don’t properly train them and show them your work practices, your new sales rep will most likely fall short of their full potential and your expectations.
To make a long story short, having a good onboarding experience is essential. Every new recruit should be assigned a mentor to assist them in navigating your work environment, culture, and processes. Even if you recruit an experienced inside sales representative, there’s no assurance that they’ll be able to figure out how things work in your organization without assistance.
Similarly, it’s critical to assist your sales team in developing and learning new skills. If you want to stay competitive, you need to keep learning. You can do a few things to make this process easier and keep your inside salespeople entirely up to speed with industry trends.
- Make a library of all the necessary resources. Collect and save relevant blog posts, reports, e-books, and other resources regarding inside sales approaches and tactics in one place so that your salespeople can find and access them quickly.
- Use online learning platforms to your advantage. It’s the only option to schedule training for your team due to social distancing restrictions. Even after things have returned to normal, you should consider using e-learning platforms in your training approach. That way, no matter where they are, all of your sales professionals will be able to educate themselves on their own time and at their own speed.
- Establish a system for receiving regular feedback. Your salespeople need to know how well they’re doing. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t criticize them if they don’t do anything correctly. Instead, use their errors to help them learn something new. This method is complex since it entails discussing sensitive topics such as mistakes and failed attempts. However, if you maintain a cheerful and helpful attitude, you may turn their errors into valuable sales lessons.
Break objectives down into achievable tasks
The fundamental formula for success is to set the correct goals. It will be easy to track your team’s progress against the objectives if you use the right CRM platform. You’ll get detailed statistics that indicate each salesperson’s performance for the selected KPIs.
Moreover, setting specific goals and evaluating success will inspire your sales force. You should meet with your company’s leaders regularly to learn about their objectives and how they plan to attain them.
Recognize and reward sales-generating actions
You want to build a winning culture to help sales reps succeed. Reward and compensate your salespeople to keep them pleased. Let’s face it: top performers are aware of their abilities, and if they don’t feel valued and compensated appropriately, they will seek out other alternatives. As a leader, you can’t afford to lose your most exemplary employees.
So, if you want to keep your top performers succeeding as SDRs, should you pay them a salary or a bonus? If you don’t compensate enough, your sales reps will be unmotivated to sell; if you pay too much, your salespeople will be too comfortable and have little feeling of urgency, reducing your prospects of increasing sales. Thousands of books and blog entries on sales compensation are testament to the fact that no one-size-fits-all sales compensation plan exists.
Make sure your pay at the very least meets the industry norm for your location, and don’t forget about the whole package. Include satisfying benefits, such as gifts, a free lunch, a parking place for the salesperson of the month, and so on, in addition to monetary rewards. Make an effort to be inventive. For example, perhaps the week’s top-performing sales team gets an afternoon team-building field trip. Individuals or teams will be motivated and challenged to achieve their best and boost income by receiving these forms of prizes, and they will enjoy working in your environment. As a result, if a competitor knocks, they will not answer. It’s all about satisfaction.
Keep your sales team engaged
Bonuses and incentives are great, but they’re not enough to keep your salespeople interested. It’s important to remember that working as an inside sales representative can be lonely and demanding. It’s complicated and mentally draining to talk to a flood of prospects every day, attempting to engage and nurture them until they ultimately say “yes.”
Let’s not forget that these are business partners, not friends, so it’s not like salespeople are chit-chatting with them in a casual and friendly setting. It’s not easy to be on your guard all of the time for fear of saying anything wrong and squandering a sales opportunity.
When we realize that your salespeople are focused on meeting their quotas and increasing income, it’s clear that they’ll need all the help they can get. That’s why it’s necessary to have open lines of contact with your inside salespeople and to check in on them on a regular basis.
When we say check on them, it doesn’t mean micromanaging. Just listen and talk to them about all the challenges they face in their work. You should remember that sales is a very competitive field, and your salespeople may find it challenging to open up and share their concerns with you. They don’t want to appear inept, so it’s up to you to start dialogues and encourage them to inform you if they need assistance with anything.
Review sales performance to see if you can improve the results
You’ve done everything you can to assist a struggling sales rep in succeeding, from training to coaching to providing the necessary technology to retraining. Despite this, the representative continues to struggle and does not improve. If retraining fails and no alternative position becomes available, the sales representative must be removed from your team. This salesperson is most certainly one of the majority of salespeople who would be better off doing something else. By severing links, you are doing fair to both parties.
Replacing salespeople is difficult, but it’s vital if you want to increase revenue.
Don’t forget to use the right technology and tools
Even if you have a great sales program, it is still not enough without the right solution to ensure that it runs smoothly. Using a sales engagement and performance management solution like Skilo guarantees that your team harness cutting-edge technology to automate and streamline the process, making it easier to implement your sales program. Easy goal setting and progress updates, performance feedback, and competency development are just a few of the processes that can be improved through technology, saving your company time and money.
You should review and communicate your sales process outside of your normal activities. This will ensure that your sales staff always functions smoothly, with qualified salespeople, the correct tools and incentives, and a successful sales program.
Skilo is a Salesforce native app that provides a ready-to-use talent management solution. It streamlines, simplifies, and unifies the end-to-end process of talent acquisition, development, and retention. Skilo provides performance management, competency frameworks, along with skills development, career planning, training management, feedback, reviews, and social employee engagement. For more information, please visit www.skilohr.com or Skilo Linkedin profile.
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