Your sales team is full of dedicated salespeople, sales managers, and high-performing individuals working towards the same revenue goals. The team’s success depends on every sales rep and team member putting in their all and creating a customer experience and company culture that nurtures success. Each sales cycle provides new opportunities to meet sales goals and increase revenue.
Every sales organization needs to be dedicated to sales performance. Everyone benefits when you can bring in new business, increase your win rate, monitor metrics, and track positive rep performance towards key benchmarks.Â
In this article, we’ll help you learn how to create a sales structure and sales strategy that monitors the sales team’s performance over time and helps you improve sales performance across your organization.
What Is Sales Productivity?
The productivity of your sales team is all about efficiency and effectiveness. It measures how successfully your team works in order to meet goals and how accurate they are at meeting those goals in comparison to the effort they put in. When you put effort into your sales productivity, you can get a good look at the challenges and hurdles that your team faces and create strategies that address those concerns.
Sales productivity has a major impact on sales performance. Your sales performance is the measurement of sales activity and how that compares to your sales goals and sales targets. You want your sales team‘s work to pay off in the form of more sales and greater revenue.Â
If your sales team members are busy, but aren’t reaching the goals you set, then they aren’t being productive: They are spending time on tasks that aren’t helping them achieve the goals that the team has in place.
When your teams can spend their time on activities related to your sales and revenue goals, you can improve the metrics of your sales team and create alignment across your entire organization. When you focus on sales productivity, you can add consistency to overall sales performance and achieve greater sales success.
Many external and internal factors can impact sales performance, including:
- Industry competition
- The supply chain
- Recruitment and staffing
- Customer preferences
- New laws or regulations
- Sales training
- The company culture
- Product or platform availability
6 Helpful Tips To Improve Sales Performance
Improving your sales performance is essential to the success of your organization. When your team focuses on improving performance, you have a better chance of reaching your goals, growing and scaling the business, and providing value to your sales team. Here are a few helpful tips to keep in mind in order to improve your sales performance.
1) Establish Clear Goals
The first step of nearly every workplace initiative is establishing clear goals. You need to set goals that are grounded in data and tie into the larger company goals that the organization is trying to achieve. When you have a clear goal in mind, it gives your entire team a single goal post to move towards as a group.
It helps to start big and then work your way down. Think about your company’s major goals, like expanding into new markets, increasing revenue, or growing your brand’s reputation in the industry. Use those goals to help develop more granular team goals that you can then share with your sales staff.Â
Once you have your big-picture goals set that affect the entire team, you can then get even more specific: Move down to individual goals like specific sales quotas for each team member and how to direct roles within your sales team in order to help you achieve your goals.
2) Provide Essential Practical Sales Training
Sales training is an important process where you work on developing the skills, techniques, and strategies that are going to help your sales team succeed. By creating and exploring different opportunities and helping your team prepare for various scenarios, you can help them close more sales, gain more confidence, communicate more effectively with customers, and bring more value to your organization as a whole.
When you provide your sales team with training opportunities, you can help them feel empowered and supported in their efforts. It also provides value to your business by making you more engaged and effective in the eyes of your customers.Â
Some companies balk at the idea of spending money and working hours on training, but it’s a strategy that more than pays for itself when you partner with the right training organization. The key is choosing a reputable partner with proven results, like Sales Assembly. Learn more about how our process works.
3) Establish Easy To Follow Processes
It’s important to have a clear sales process that everyone on your team can relate to. You might want to think of it as a type of service level agreement, or SLA, with your internal team and partners. When you have a simplified sales process that is easy to follow, your team members won’t be confused about the steps they need to take or the tasks they are responsible for completing.
The more layers you add to the process and the more complexity you have in your process, the harder it becomes for your sales team members to follow the process accurately. It can lead to a high level of human error, with steps being missed or deliberately ignored.Â
A complicated sales process can also become overwhelming for team members and take up all of their time and become the main focus of the job, rather than working with leads and closing deals. You want to make sure that the process you have in place can serve the outcome and goals you have previously set.
4) Encourage Feedback and Offer 1:1 Sales Coaching
Having key performance indicators, or KPIs, is an important way of tracking the performance of individual sales team members and the team as a whole. Your team needs to have the proper expectations in place to accomplish those goals.Â
However, they also need to have an avenue to speak up and give you feedback (or speak one on one) if they are unable to do what is requested of them. Encouraging feedback is an important part of successful management, and it helps your team know how they can help themselves. It also gives you important information on how to elevate and improve the sales process.
Typically, the responsibility of feedback falls to sales leaders and sometimes enablement team members. The managers of team members who carry quotas are the ones who provide the first line of defense and provide feedback on coaching to make sure that all sales team members can meet their goals. By providing personal coaching and ensuring that you are spending time with each of your employees in a one-on-one setting, you show that you care about what they have to say and are genuinely interested in receiving feedback from them.
5) Proactive Performance Management and Career Development
Supporting employees in their career development is an important but often overlooked part of sales management. In order to keep employees happy and reduce the amount of turnover in your organization, you need to be engaged with your team and work towards cultivating their future careers.Â
You want your team to trust you to provide them with opportunities for growth and want them to be a part of the team for a long-term period. Therefore, it’s important to have a plan in place to give your employees a clear path forward. If an employee feels that there isn’t room for growth in your company and that they will still be in the same role making the same money in five or 10 years, they won’t be as invested in the company’s growth — or excited about sticking with the team for the long term.
As a team, it helps to create stretch goals that might be several years out so that employees can buy into their future in the company. When they can see goals that are far in the future and the impact they have on moving towards those goals, it can help close some of the big barriers to closing deals. The team knows how to keep moving toward future goals and doesn’t stall when they meet short-term goals.Â
Establishing these types of goals keeps everyone constantly moving in the same direction, with the same motivators and the same mindset. This ensures that all of your team members can picture themselves in that future and, even more than that, are excited about achieving those goals and meeting those goal posts.
6) Offer Proper Compensation Strategies
Another part of working with your employees and putting their needs first is offering the right compensation strategies that engage, encourage, and reward your team members for their hard work. You also want to make sure that you are attracting and training the right fit employees for your business.Â
Compensation strategies refer to the types of plans you have in place to reward employees, such as additional bonus opportunities, sales commissions, increasing percentages, and other incentives strategies like gift cards or rewards.
Think about it: If you don’t offer a competitive compensation plan with plenty of benefits and incentives, you won’t attract top talent. That means that you could spend time, effort, and money on training people who aren’t productive or won’t be able to help your business achieve your long-term goals.Â
A good compensation plan also helps you retain your motivated employees and helps reward the people who are actively contributing to the profitability of your organization and your major goals.
Improve Sales Performance With Sales Assembly
Sales performance, and sales productivity and efficiency, are all tied together. When your team can succeed, the entire organization will see the benefits. By having clear goals, tracking important KPIs, and offering regular feedback and improvement incentives, your team will have a better overall mindset — and be better positioned to increase conversions.
At Sales Assembly, we want to help you improve your sales performance. Our platform helps team scale their team and their strategy. Whether it be teaching the team how to automate sales tasks, follow up with customers, close deals faster or scale your business, we’ve got the team training and strategy advisory covered with our all-in-own company membership. To learn more about how we can help you, contact us today and discover everything you need to know about membership and our commitment to helping you achieve revenue success.
