Negosentro.com | 4 Keys To Running a Top Notch Sales Team | Your sales team is the heart of your organization. They are the face of your company to your clients. They know the pain points your clients are feeling and the solutions they are looking for. Without them, the deals just don’t get closed. So, how do you find the best sales team and keep them running efficiently? Here are four keys to recognizing and nurturing talent on your sales team.
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Provide Guidance Not Micromanagement
You can have the best enterprise sales team in the business, but if you are a micromanager, you’re wasting your time and theirs. When you provide the best training and work with your employees to develop their personal goals they can take care of selling the product. Be clear about your expectations and meet with each employee individually at least once a week and a full team meeting at least every other week. Your goal with these meetings is to understand any problems outside of business that may be affecting your team members, find out where they are on deals and provide guidance and encouragement.
When you give your team structure they’ll always know what they should be doing. When you give your team trust they’ll always know that they can make the decisions that will benefit the client and company most. Use key performance indicators so your team can measure their own performance. That way meetings aren’t about explaining the metrics, they are about improving them.
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Look at Your Current Process and Team
You can make changes to your personal leadership style, but until you evaluate your current processes and employees, you don’t know what changes you’ll need to make. If you have high employee turnover, look at exit interviews to see if there’s a common denominator of why people are leaving and work to address it. Is your closure rate low? Look at whether it’s the product, the marketing or your team. Think of solutions over which you have influence. Finally, look at individual performance. Talk to your low performers to find out what’s going on. The role may not be a good fit. Talk to your high performers. What are they doing differently?
From these conversations, you can figure out your team gaps and training needs. With the data to back up your findings, it will be an easy sell to the executive board to get the changes you need.
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Find the Staff You Need
Of course, you can stick with salespeople who have a proven track record of success but if you want to bring on fresh members and promote to sales from within your other departments it’s important to know the qualities that indicate sales potential. The first thing to look for is a team member who can listen. Salespeople are known for being positive and outgoing, but if that manifests itself as always talking and never listening, that person will never be able to understand what the client truly wants.
After you verify you’ve got a good listener, you need someone who is both confident and resilient. No matter the product, sales are nine “no”s for every “yes.” People who get discouraged and give up will never make it. Once you’ve got your team, teach them to overcome the fear of cold calling or dealing with C-level executives through training.
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Create Processes
If you have a team of five salespeople and they all excel, you’d think you have it made, but if they’re all approaching sales differently, it’s not good for your company branding and reputation. Make sure you have a process in place for every situation so that no matter what salesperson the client deals with, they’ll get the same answers and the same level of service. Have scripts in place for every “if-then” situation you can think of, from the first cold call to upselling services at the end of a deal.
Whether you already have a great team, or you’re building one from the ground up, following these four tips will help your sales department thrive.
