6 Ways to Boost Your Sales Team Performance

As sales teams improve productivity, more sales are made, thus generating more revenue for the company. There is no doubt: It’s in a company’s best interest to have a strong sales team. Here are 6 ways to improve sales team productivity.

1. Create a Sales Plan

If your company does not already have a sales plan in place, you need to get one immediately. A sales plan summarizes the objectives of the team, as well as the processes used to make sales, strategies and tactics, and ways to measure success.

Having a plan improves performance by allowing executives to consult with sales representatives in order to brainstorm ways of improving or changing the plan. It also allows the sales team to have a clear objective as to what they should be focusing on. The plan also demonstrates how to track sales in order to ensure you are keeping up with goals.

Some of the ways executives can help their sales teams meet these goals are through regular feedback, conversations and even healthy competition. These can be achieved through a sales plan. It is important that companies know how to use incentives to drive high-performance sales.

2. Use a Small-Business Customer Relationship Management System Properly

Just like having a sales plan, it is also important to have a CRM software tool to help analyze how your plan is working in real time. The goal of using a CRM system is to improve your relationships with customers by improving connections.

CRM allows a company to automate repetitive aspects of sales and provides analytics that reps need to attract customers and retain customers.

CRM tools allow automatic access to analytics reports. These reports help you easily identify your performance and acknowledge where you need to improve. This technology also allows sales teams to work with a real-time dashboard so they can see their data and analytics. The system also allows you to forecast revenue and make changes if that forecast isn’t where you need it to be.

Some CRM systems like the salesforce agency allow you to make customised reports on data points to get specific reports on specific sales processes.

3. Look at Sales Metrics

Metrics give teams the opportunity to always have their sales performance staring them in the face. This allows them to make important decisions, like understanding where their focus and improvement needs to be.

These metrics allow sales teams to monitor their progress on different projects and individual sales. They can look at their strengths, as well as areas they need to focus on more. They can also look at this data as a team.

Sales metrics allow teams to set goals and access how each of them are performing in reference to those goals.

4. Run a Smoother Meeting

We all know how draining weekly meetings can be, but they are common for sales departments. Typical meetings are just check-ins and may not focus on how the team is performing. A smooth sales meeting needs to ensure each member of the team knows how to make changes so the entire department is constantly bringing in strong and improving numbers.

Holding regular meetings that are clear about how to improve allows each sales team member to focus on themselves and understand how they can deliver their best performance in reference to the goals set out in the meeting. Having a dialogue in the meetings lets each team member learn from the other and allows not only friendly competition, but also support and reassurance.

Having weekly meetings also forces the sales manager to take time out of a potentially busy schedule to review the analytics and data and make goals and assumptions based on that data.

5. Lead by Coaching

As a sales manager, it is important to lead the team by doing. This can be the best coaching mechanism. If a sales rep notices their boss working just as hard if not harder than they are, they will see that as setting the bar for themselves.

While it is important to lead by doing, it is also important to help sales reps develop and give them all the means they need to be successful. Bosses and older sales reps can share best practices for making calls and emails, how to act in meetings and how to improve performance.

As far as coaching goes, it is also important to find what motivates each sales rep. It is important as a team to talk about what each member’s goals are and what can be done to meet them. It is important to understand motivations that can help improve sales. Then you can help keep every sales rep motivated based on their answer.

6. Align Sales and Marketing Goals

It is important to have all communication goals aligned when looking to achieve high-performance sales. This means sales and marketing reps need to communicate and align their interests because in the end, the entire organization is working toward the same goal: higher performance.

There are a number of benefits to having sales and marketing reps work together. Marketers can better understand the process of making a sale and what goes into the company-to-customer relationship. This allows them to create marketing campaigns that highlight that process and foster positive relationships.

There Are Many Ways to Motivate Your Team

It is easy to resort to just a few low standards you know you can meet every time. It is much harder to challenge yourself to meet higher standards, which require assistance and encouragement. As an executive, it is important to take a step back and ask what your team needs in order to improve.

By creating a comfortable environment for learning, you can encourage employees to push themselves to reach higher performance goals.