Enterprise

Transform Your Sales Team into a Sales Powerhouse

Have you ever taken a step back to look at your sales team from an outside point of view?

Have you ever took the time to see just what they are achieving, how they are working and how the team dynamics are working in achieving the overall company goals?

Let’s face it, in the day to day drum of business, we tend to get stuck in endless processes and in the comforts of what we have created. We tend to focus on getting through the day and reaching targets than to try something new and innovative that could change up the way we do business.

Maybe it’s time to do this experiment in the team. You never know where you could find a massive flaw in the system or where you could find a pot of gold ready to be snatched up.

Take A Long, Hard Look at Your Sales Team

Doing analysis of your sales team is always a good idea.The first thing to do it do an analysis of the team. Monitoring the performance and the general behavior within your team will improve your scope of what exactly is taking place on the sales floor. Without alerting them to what you are doing, start monitoring performance and general behavior within the team. If you let the team in on what you are doing, they will start boosting their performance. You rather want a clear, untainted view on who was in the team and what exactly they are doing.

In many cases in a team, we get used to the familiarity of the members of the team. We get lulled into average performance and general business aptitude. If you take a step out and look at the team from a stranger’s perspective, you will see the team in a new way. Sales statistics show how much is changing, as reps, today spend only 34% of their time actually selling. For the most part, the members are battling with data or admin processes that take up the majority of their time.

Try and monitor performance over a month, taking into consideration pitches, communication skills, and general behavior within the office. Weigh up the pros and cons of every member and created a full analysis sheet to ascertain where they belonged in the organization.

Restructure The Team

The hard part of managing any team is to know when you can let go of underperformers. At the end of the day, each team member is there to sell your product or service. If they are not doing that, ask yourself why they are there.

Based on your analysis that you have conducted, you might need to take the next step to juggle the team around. There might be severe underperformers who need to be removed from the team, and there might be some who need to be put on probation to watch their progress.

You will also see several other members of the team who have potential and who need to be reworked into other teams, or given different responsibilities or functions within the company.

High performers need to be rewarded and promoted to team leaders and managers which they could work up to. Motivation will become key in the team.

Open The Lines Of Communication

During the the performance analysis and resulting communication with the team, you will probably understand just how underheard the sales team really is. The company usually fails to hear out their desires to grow in the company or solve basic needs for them to sell. This will be your key learning throughout the whole process; the team had a very important voice.

You will need to start prioritizing employee engagement and know when and how to hear the teams voice!

The second lesson that you can learn is just how much the team can guide you on the companies customer. Your sales team are your customer-facing agents in the company. They are listening to your target audience directly and actually have heaps of knowledge about their wants and needs.

After the analysis, take a month to sit with the sales team alone, and with them, hear what thir version of the customer profile is. This will be based on what each team member is experiencing with their interactions. One of the best ways of making this even more engaging and productive, is by setting up a team productivity tool, which will become their key method of communication.

The third step to take is to set up monthly strat meetings with the team in which they can sit together with the marketing team and work through the customers wants and needs. It is vital to align the previously siloed teams to start meeting client demands.

Kickstart The Sales Process With Great Marketing

Interdepartmental communication needs to become a top priority in the company. It is vital for sales and marketing to be working together and communicating daily on campaigns and lead generation. Sales statistics shows that 40% of sales people say that prospecting is the toughest part of the job. It is vital for the marketing department, therefore to make it easier for the team to get more qualified leads through heightened and informative campaigns.

Task the sales team with higher involvement in the marketing campaigns by giving them a platform to voice their views on what the customer wanted. Allow them to examine many of the social campaigns, weekly mailers, and ad campaigns to ascertain just how many leads each generated.

Another experiment that you can conduct is to allow the sales team to develop their own gmail ad campaign based on their customer knowledge and allow the marketing department to restructure their processes based on this for two weeks.

After the month test, analyze the results. The number of qualified leads should dramatically increase after the test. It should lead to a streamlined message had made it easier for them to pitch the customer.

Marketing is the portal for the customer into the company. The marketing department’s job is to introduce the customer to the company, the product or the service.

This same message needs to be carried through by the sales team to convert the leads to sales, and if the messages are inconsistent, you have just lost a sale!

To Wrap Up

Some of the key findings that you need to take from this exercise is to humble yourself as a senior in the organization. Business and customers are permanently evolving and what worked five years ago, just might not work today. The second lesson to learn is that not all employees work the same, and that is ok. For the longest time, companies have tried to typecast the perfect employee and mold the team into that. Unfortunately, most have lost a lot of talent on the way, as they simply did not understand their way of working.

The last lesson that you should learn in this is the importance of interdepartmental relations and communication. Marketing and sales teams are usually split and separate from each other He had always split the marketing and sales team into different areas, and after this experiment, but there is great importance in marketing-sales communication.

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