Published by Programme B
At its most basic, a sales team needs only a few things: leads and a way of communicating with them. But while sales can be closed with just a name and a phone number, to be effective a sales team needs a lot more than phones and a list of leads.
If you want your sales team to flourish, here are four things you will need to cultivate or provide to ensure sustainable growth.
1. Motivation
Nothing kills a sales team’s morale like a lack of motivation. If you want your sales reps to be giving their best day-in and day-out, you need to make sure they are engaged in their work and have a strong sense for the importance of what they are doing, and also understand that their work is valued by the company.
If you want to create a more motivated sales team, there are plenty of online tips that can help you do so; but perhaps the most important thing you can do is to work closely alongside the team to build bonds of rapport and trust so they understand that you have their best interests at heart.
2. The Right Software
Experienced sales reps bring wealth or real-world knowledge and skills to their job, and getting the most out of these qualities means maximizing the number of time reps spend on calls and emails, and minimizing the time they spend deciding who to call next.
For this reason, getting the right software is a crucial aspect of making sales more efficient. Sales engagement platforms can free up significant amounts of time by providing queue-based lead routing that automatically prioritizes a reps list of leads, ensuring that they are always calling the best lead.
If you don’t have a sales engagement platform, or you are unhappy with the sales engagement platform you currently have, you can learn more about your options by researching new sales engagement platforms that offer a range of time-saving services to your sales reps, including auto-populating emails and providing real-time sales insights.
3. Clear Goals
As any experienced manager knows, progress is impossible if you don’t set clear goals. Every sales team needs to start the day knowing what is expected of them, but it is also useful to break larger goals up into smaller ones so that sales reps can feel like they are making progress throughout the day.
4. Incentives
It might seem like “incentive” is the same thing as “motivation,” but the reality is that in the world of sales, they are two distinct things. Where motivation is about bigger “why” questions related to the work a sales rep is doing, incentive is much more about direct rewards for performance.
Put differently, motivation is an internal thing, while incentives are external. While a good manager should motivate their workers by encouraging them to see value in what they are doing, they should also provide concrete incentives for daily performance. This can take the form of bonuses or increased commissions, but it can also mean offering dedicated salespeople seniority, or first pick of the leads.
No matter what business you are in, the performance of your sales team is going to be essential to the overall success of your brand, and there are no magic formulas that will help you ensure that your sales team is operating at peak efficiency.
But by motivating your team to do well, providing them with the tools they need for success and clear goals to understand what success means, and incentivizing their work, you will help ensure that they are engaged in their work and are striving for excellence.
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