Is your sales team not performing as expected? Do they lack the motivation to improve their sales performance? If you answered “yes” to both questions, you are not alone. According to a recent study, 66% of salespersons do not reach their quotas. This is due to assigning the wrong role to the wrong persons, lack of skills, drive, training, and mentoring, or failure to understand the products, services, or industry.  In this article, we explore six effective strategies you could adopt to help your sales team find success.

1. Create specific, realistic, and attainable goals

Setting goals is an effective way to improve your sales performance because they motivate your employees. Goals are a driving force that gives your sales team a sense of direction and a plan to reach beyond their current disposition to realise their full potential.  Without a clear picture of what your team wants to achieve, you increase the risk of rambling along, which leads to missing opportunities and wasting time and money.

Ensure your goals are reasonable and attainable. Consider breaking down broader goals into simple, easy-to-reach, actionable milestones. If you set goals that are too difficult to achieve, you could cause your team’s confidence to plummet, leading to underperformance.

2. Invest in technology

Help your sales team complete tasks efficiently and quickly by automating parts of the sales process. Technology can help you ensure all sales data is accurate and accessible to every member of your sales team. It also enables you to examine your sales process and gain insights to enhance performance.

For instance, investing in cloud-based CRM helps you improve collaboration. CRM software also enables you to keep track of customers and calls. Tools like headsets and tablets can also help your sales team to multi-task effortlessly, ensuring customer calls and meetings are well-documented. Be sure to also invest in a sales template to help your sales team create customised offers and proposals for your customers.

3. Hire the right people

Perhaps the best way to improve the performance of your sales team is to hire the right people for the role. Sales are time-consuming and demanding, so you need the right people to succeed. When hiring, focus on more than just finding top talent. You should also ensure the candidates have personal traits and skills that make them receptive to coaching and training. These include a love for collaboration, high emotional intelligence, and optimism. The suitable candidates should also be competitive and creative and have a strong desire to achieve.

4. Know your team

Hiring the right salespeople is not enough. Creating successful sales management strategies is difficult if you do not know your sales personnel. However, knowing your team does not only entail apparent aspects such as their faces and names. Be sure to take time to understand your team’s sales-specific traits, such as their strengths, weaknesses, learning style, selling style, and motivators. This enables you to connect with your team and boost their productivity. According to a Gallup survey, organisations whose staff are more engaged or connected have a 21% higher engagement rate than disengaged companies.

5. Conduct regular one-on-one meetings with your team  

One of the most effective ways to determine what is holding your sales team back from reaching its goals and objectives is by holding one-on-one meetings with each team member. One-on-one sessions also give you a clear picture of how every sales representative performs, feels, and thinks. They also provide insights, from your sales perspective, about the issues that could be stunting your performance progress, enabling you to make informed decisions and adjustments.

6. Train and coach your sales team

Invest in one-on-one coaching programs to address individual sales rep weaknesses. You could also set up ongoing learning and training programs to support your sales team initiatives. Sales is an ever-evolving field, so continued training and coaching ensure your team is up to date with the latest sales trends. It also ensures your sales team is informed about customer needs. This allows them to capture customer needs and pain points in their sales offers and proposals, enabling them to close sales quickly.

Endnote

Sales are the lifeblood of any successful organisation. Improve your sales team performance by creating realistic and attainable goals, investing in technology, hiring the right people, holding one-on-one meetings, and training and coaching your staff.