When you are in charge of sales, your company depends upon you to pull together an effective sales team that consistently meets targets. As sales manager, you likely understand the importance of providing developmental opportunities for your reps. Perhaps you even implemented a consultative selling training program. But you recognize that training alone won’t guarantee results.
What else should you be doing to hit your sales targets?
Here are 4 tips that will keep your team performing at its best. You need to:
- Ensure a talent pipeline. Salespeople leave even the best of teams. Be prepared to fill open slots by consistently pre-recruiting high sales performers.
- Spend three-quarters of your time coaching. Get in the field with your salespeople and use every interaction as an opportunity to coach and reinforce the critical few sales behaviors you know work best for your unique sales strategy and culture.
- Create an understandable, believable and implementable sales strategy and methodology that will help your team take advantage of the right opportunities. First, be crystal clear about your alignment with the business strategy, target clients, unique differentiation, success metrics, goals, roles and key strategic actions. Then provide a step-by-step sales methodology that helps them qualify customers, prioritize potential deals, identify decision makers, build client relationships, overcome obstacles and negotiate for a win without being too cumbersome, administrative or inefficient.
- Smooth the path so sales reps can do what they do best—sell—without having to needlessly navigate through any unnecessary pricing, legal, reporting, forecasting, servicing, shipping, billing or collecting issues. Be their advocate within the organization and keep them as productive and client-centric as possible.
