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When it comes to keeping up with things, sales teams usually have it the hardest. There’s no telling when a competitor will suddenly emerge and take customers away from the team, and old sales tactics rarely stay effective for more than a year or two. If you’re worried about your company’s sales team, then you need to find different ways to make it more efficient and productive.
Improving your company’s sales team requires effort on all three fronts:the individual representatives, the team as a whole, and the business itself. In order to help you get the best results, we made a list of things that you should prioritize if you need to get your sales team going as soon as possible.
Keep the Team Motivated
Motivation is one of the cornerstones of having a productive team, and one of the best ways to keep a team motivated is by giving them something worthwhile to look forward to. In most cases, this comes in the form of reward-based bonuses and incentives. Most employees appreciate making effort if they know that effort will be rewarded accordingly.
While there are many types of reward-based incentives, it’s just as important to make sure these incentives are delivered with near-perfect consistency. Using advanced compensation management software ensures that efforts to go above and beyond aren’t just properly rewarded, but also rewarded on time. This also has a bonus benefit of enhancing employee loyalty, since they are more likely to stay working for a company with a dependable compensation system.
Appoint the Right Leader
While having a team of talented sales representatives is great, it’s still a team that needs to have a unified direction. Having a talented sales manager brings members together so they can all get on the same page. However, before you start promoting your best sales rep to a leadership position, you have to take some time and think: is that what your sales team really need?
While having a leader that knows the ins and outs of making sales is preferred, you have to put more weight on an individual’s leadership skills. An individual that can successfully make sales representatives work together, provide effective coaching, and identify a team’s strengths and weaknesses is more worthy of being a team lead than someone that can make more sales than the next representative and nothing much.
Be More Efficient with the Workload
You just have to accept the fact that some sales representatives make more sales than others. Trying to get them to achieve similar figures as your top rep will just end up demoralizing team members and take away their motivation. Instead, you (and by extension your appointed team lead), must be able to work with each member’s skills in the most efficient way possible: by distributing the workload properly.
Distributing the load evenly relative to each member’s performance is a lot easier than it sounds; using data collected by software (compensation management software works for this), you can easily sort each member based on performance. Assign lighter loads to representatives that are having trouble hitting the minimum figures so they can focus more on each call to increase the chance of successful sales and have the top representatives handle more calls (don’t forget to reward them accordingly).
There’s no doubt that directing a team of sales representatives can be a very tedious ordeal. Different representative skill levels and different circumstances for each attempted sale make sales one of the most unpredictable factors of running any business. However, taking the right approach to improving your sales team allows you to maximize your sales during high times and minimize losses in case there’s trouble.
