Of course, to help your sales team find true success, it’ll take a lot more than exciting rewards. They also need a strong leader, someone who knows what it takes to reach the top.
Are you ready to take your sales team to the next level? Read on to learn the top tips all sales team leaders should know.
1. Evaluate Your Team
Doctors diagnose patients before prescribing prescriptions. The same line of thinking holds for coaching a sales team. Leaders have to diagnose or evaluate, their sales team before they can set the right goals.
Assessing the players on your team, identify what your sales agents’ strengths and weaknesses are. Once you know what you’re working with, you can accurately prescribe a winning sales plan.
For instance, let’s say you’re working with a team of employees that are new to sales. You’ll want to focus on increasing the team members selling knowledge, as well as their confidence in the product or service your company offers.
However, what if you have a team of all-stars sales professionals? Holding their hands through the sales process will only slow them down. Instead, you’ll want to keep your experienced sales professionals motivated with clear goals.
2. Have the Right Drive
Being productive isn’t enough. Employees also need to understand that your organization is results-oriented. That’s why sales team leaders have to create the right type of environment for their team to flourish.
One of the best ways to help a sales team succeed is by building results-driven culture. When team members understand that it’s the key sales metrics that matter most, they’ll know where to focus their efforts.
3. Create Accountability
To help remind employees that your goals are outcome related, post-sales goals up around the office place. During your team meetings, review the sales goals and your team’s progress towards achieving them.
Every day, employees should know how well the team’s doing at achieving the month’s sales goals. If any employees aren’t producing results, don’t let that problem go unaddressed.
4. Have Competitions
We find that results-driven work culture operates best when you hire competent people. When people are competitive, they’re likely to enjoy working on a sales team that’s results-driven.
To keep things interesting, consider doing friendly inter-office competitions. You can award prizes such as special break privileges, gift cards, or parking spots.
5. Go Beyond Time Management
Having a team that’s results-driven is a great first step. However, to make it possible for your team members to reach their sales goals, they’ll need to have proper time management skills.
When we hear the words time management, we often think of doing things on time, and not procrastinating. If you say you’ll call a customer at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, you call them at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. While, it’s true, being on time is a big part of time management, there’s a lot more to it.
Time management also means that team members know how to budget their time. Budgeting time can be especially tricky when you’re dealing with customers over the phone. You’ll need to teach your sales team how to control the conversation, without making the customer feel rushed.
6. Monitor Phone Time
After training your sales team on how to control the phone conversation, set clear phone goals. For example, let’s say your sales team members have to contact 30 sales leads a day. Let each team member know approximately how long they should be spending on the phone for each lead.
If the goal is to spend 10-15 minutes on the phone with the customer, and a sales agent is spending an hour, that’s something you can address as the leader.
Instead of punishing employees for mismanaging their phone time, look for learning opportunities. Listen to one of your sales agents longer phone calls and identify what’s causing them to take more time than other sales agents.
Finally, setting clear time management goals will also help sales agents with off the phone duties.
7. Focus on Selling
Do you ever notice that your team members are spending too much time on customer service tasks, instead of focusing on sales? It’s easy to get caught up in entering notes into the customer relationship platform. After all, sometimes it’s the notes that help close a sale in the future.
However, since sales are ultimately a numbers game, you’ll want to help keep your salespeople focusing on selling. Every week, review how much time your sales agents are spending in the customer relationship platform.
If you think your workers are spending too much time on the customer service platform, address the issue immediately. Hold a team meeting, review time budget goals, and explain why these goals are in place.
Next, speak to team members to identify what’s causing them to spend so much time in the customer relationship platform. Your sales agents may be wasting time chasing stale leads from the previous week. By redirecting your team members to focus on fresh leads, you’ll help them spend their time more effectively.
8. Sales Leaders Take the Blame
The best sales leaders are the ones who know how to accept responsibility. When something goes wrong, be transparent with your sales team. This includes when things go wrong that aren’t solely your fault.
For instance, let’s say your team isn’t hitting their sales numbers. Instead of holding a team meeting and shifting the blame, surprise your sales agents by accepting the blame. Let them know that you want to serve them better as a leader, and together you all can achieve the sales goals!
Next, outline ways you’ll be providing support to team members to help them achieve sales goals. You could support your team by providing 1 on 1 training sessions, reviewing time budget reports, and more.
Successful Sales Team Leaders
Now you know how successful sales team leaders operate. When you’re willing to go above and beyond for your team, the results are astounding!
We hope that our article will inspire you to be the leader you always knew you could be. For more ways to be your best self, explore the rest of this site!
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