Author: Katie Coalson

Building a Successful Sales Team During COVID

Many of us started the new year ready to leave 2020 behind and hopeful for a better year. COVID has impacted many businesses, causing long lasting repercussions. Despite the circumstances, sales leaders are still working on creating a successful, profitable year for their teams.

Here are some things you can do to help lead your team in the right direction and promote growth in your business this year.

 

Getting It Right The First Time: Hire The Right People At The Right Roles 

To build a highly successful sales team, you must address the most important starting point—the people you hire. Hiring the right people and clearly defining their roles helps set you up for long-term success, as you’re able to utilize their true talents and skills. Most companies make the mistake of hiring individuals for general roles, relying on them to handle every single aspect of the process—a decision that can later lead to unmet quotas and poorly managed goals. 

During the hiring process, make sure to closely analyze the candidate’s strengths. You need to ensure that all attributes closely match the job role, especially when it comes to years of experience. It’s best to invest in personality and cognitive tests that can determine the right personality traits, especially when it comes to specialized roles. 

After hiring new reps, training and coaching is an important next step. You can have a talented employee, but if you don’t set them up for success, they won’t meet their full potential. Consider creating a playbook with sales messaging so that the whole team, old and new, can be on the same page with how to communicate high value to prospects. 

 

Embracing Innovation: Arm Your Team with Automated Tools

Although hiring the right people will feel like a battle already won, it’s only the beginning of the work. Having the right foundation won’t be as useful without the right tools, as even the best of people need help. In other words, it’s very important that you invest in processes and tools that will help your staff reach their full potential. 

Delivering quality work does not always rely on sheer talent alone—you need to supply them with the right tools, so empower them by automating and streamlining administrative processes. By automating these manual tasks, you free them from doing busy-work. They can devote more time and attention to things that matter more, including building relationships with clients and recruiting loyal customers. 

 

Stick To The Landing: Find The Right Coaching Method 

Now that you have the right tools and the perfect employees, you now need to make sure that they’re continuously growing. Allowing your team to simply become robots and bring the revenue will eventually affect your company’s performance, as good leadership is never steady—it’s always climbing towards sales success. 

That said, make sure to set expectations with your managers and employees, especially when it comes to observing and coaching. You need to consciously evaluate your team, hold them accountable, and allow them enough room to grow and be trained. In doing so, you ensure not only your company’s continued success, but a loyal team dedicated to helping you achieve. 

 

Invest In The Most Effective Sales Training With The Right Partner

Building a high-performing sales team can be challenging, especially since it has been such an unpredictable environment. COVID-19 has changed the world in more ways than one, but there are ways to ensure not only your company’s survival, but its success. 

Consider partnering with a sales consultancy that helps train and coach your sales team, while making sure everyone is on the same page and consistently communicating value. MasterMessaging deeply understands the benefits of sales training, and we have developed innovative ways to help your company grow. We now offer virtual training and coaching sessions, making it easier to be safe and successful. Elevate your value—reach out to us today.

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We understand it can be difficult to know where to start when trying to communicate value in every sales conversation. That’s why we’ve created an E-book on communicating value that you can download HERE.

Avoiding Micromanaging

As a sales team leader, it can be challenging not to find yourself micromanaging your team every so often. While you do so with good reasons, micromanaging can get in the way of your team members’ style and productivity. It can hurt their motivation and ability to work properly too. 

We know that this can be a hard habit to break, but if you manage to do so, you will find that your team won’t just become more successful, but they’ll be happier to work for you even more.

That said, here is how to lead your team to success without micromanagement:

  1. Look for Feedback

You want to be a leader that’s doing your best to support and work with your team to achieve great results. However, some things you might do might not go well in the minds of your team. For that reason, it is always vital that you ask for feedback.

When your team lets you know about how they feel about things or what they think will work, you improve yourself as a leader. This will also help you discover your weaknesses and find ways to become even better.

  1. Allow for Some Freedom

You might believe that your way is the only acceptable way to achieve success. Unfortunately, this will push you to micromanage your team, forcing them to adopt your practices instead of the methods that they are more comfortable with. Remember, what you believe is in your mind, and your team may think otherwise.

On that note, always allow for some freedom of expression within your sales team. Allow them to carry out methods that they believe will work. Not only will this enable them to discover which ways work best to increase sales, but you do not have to burden yourself trying to chase perfection. Both sides win, resulting in you having less work and your employees attaining more professional freedom!

  1. Communicate Often

Failing to communicate is the downfall of any team. Not only do other team members not know what to do, but they also will not know how to communicate their concerns or issues with you either! For that reason, it is vital that you practice keeping open communications with your members and lay down rules on how you want them to talk to you.

In your conversations, you want to include many things. For instance, you want to share with them what you want to achieve with your efforts, including how to go about it. Also, ask them to communicate back at you if they find you micromanaging them.

By promoting a back and forth of information, your work environment will foster innovation and productivity—both qualities of a high-performing sales team!

  1. Consider Hiring a Sales Consultant

Sometimes it can be helpful to get an outside perspective and mix things up for your sales team. If they are constantly hearing from you in the day to day, they might not be as motivated to learn new techniques and strategies from you as well. 

Hiring a sales trainer can help get everyone on the same page while also teaching them new and valuable skills. You could also have someone do ongoing coaching to make sure the team is performing the way you’d like them to. 

Conclusion

By giving your team members freedom, communicating with them often, and asking for feedback, you can become a better leader that avoids micromanagement and allows everyone to work at their best. Hiring a sales consultant to take some of the responsibility off your plate is a great option as well.

Your team will trust in your leadership skills and be motivated to work hard to accomplish your team’s goals. At the same time, you will trust your team, giving the space they need to carry out their efforts to the best of their ability.

Are you looking for sales training programs in Georgia to boost your sales team’s efficiency? Master Messaging is a sales consulting firm that provides teams with a deeper understanding of how to be successful at sales. Get in touch with us today and let us empower your sales team to grow your business even further.

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We understand it can be difficult to know where to start when building a framework for sales conversations, so we’ve developed a Sales Conversation “Cheat Sheet” you can download HERE.

3 Tips To Make Remote Work Easier on You and Your Sales Team

The pandemic has forced many companies to adopt a remote work system, but what you might not know is that companies have been making this shift since 2019—with up to 66 percent of companies allowing remote work and up to 16 percent going fully remote. In the last twelve years alone, remote work has grown by over 159 percent.

However, shifting to a remote work system isn’t easy. It requires a lot of planning for things that don’t apply in a traditional work environment. Without a proper system in place, your sales force could operate at suboptimal levels and yield thin and unsatisfying results. 

In this article, we will go over a few successful sales strategies you can implement to smoothen the transition from office work to remote work—for better sales, better productivity, and better profits.

Set actionable goals

Working from home is an entirely different animal. It is more difficult for managers to do spot checks of a worker’s efficiency and performance. While you could allow for more flexibility in terms of goals and objectives in an office environment, this is not effective in a work-from-home system.

Experts in sales strategies will tell you that setting actionable and measurable goals helps boost employee productivity. The clearer the goals are, the better the employee is likely to work. In sales, you can create a weekly or daily quota, depending on what it is you’re trying to sell. 

Hire an experienced workforce

Experience is always a premium when it comes to new hires. However, it is now more important than ever to find people who have experience working in different conditions, particularly with work-from-home setups.

As mentioned before, working from home has been a staple in the operations of many companies. As such, there are plenty of experienced sales professionals out there who work well in a remote environment. These professionals will likely have better work habits than those shifting from office work.

Promote employee engagement

One of the many things plaguing the workforce now working from home, whether they are in sales or not, is the isolation. There is no friendly banter with colleagues, no much-needed stops at the local bar before going home, and no chats around the water cooler. 

As such, using platforms like Slack to create group chat channels to encourage employee interaction is a great way to make up for the physical isolation. The internet is at our fingertips. Why not use it to recreate the experience of a work environment? You could even make channels for shared interests, such as video games, music, and so on.

Final thoughts

The adjustment from an office environment to the remote work system is not an easy task for everyone involved. Employees have to face the risk of blurred lines between work and home life, and managers have to deal with leading from miles and miles away. But with the right planning and the proper systems in place, you can enjoy an operation level similar to when you were working in offices. 

If you need more help with remote sales strategies for your business, please reach out. We offer online sales team coaching and training that is especially beneficial to those who are working remotely. 

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We understand it can be difficult to know where to start when building a framework for sales conversations, so we’ve developed a Sales Conversation “Cheat Sheet” you can download HERE.

How to Close Sales Performance Gaps and Boost Revenue

Sales is a volume-driven industry. When you work as a salesperson, there’s an expectation that you’ll exceed the goals your manager has set. For some reps, that’s easy. The average rep, though, could use a little more help with meeting their quotas.

Many sales managers think that the solution to driving revenues up is hiring more high-performing individuals. In a sense, they’re right; the majority of a company’s revenue usually comes from its best reps. Having effective sales conversations means closing gaps in a sales team though, so it needs a better strategy than just recruiting people with glowing records.

An all-star roster doesn’t mean seamless sales

It sounds counter intuitive, but stacking your team with high performers isn’t going to bring you more revenue. Instead of getting more help from the outside, focus on developing existing talent. 

Sales is a highly competitive field, and only a few top-tier salespeople are looking for a job at any given time. What’s more, you need to compete with other companies who are also looking to attract the best talent for their business.

A rep shines the best where they get the balance between comfort and challenge. A star employee who exceeded their quota regularly in their old company will not automatically perform well when they transfer to yours. The best way to develop a high-performing team is by growing the potential in middle-tier sales representatives.

Closing sales performance gaps

Sales performance gaps are present even in the best teams and among the best reps. Proactively thinking of opportunities to upskill the team or the group will help you sidestep recurring issues with skill gaps.

For instance, reps not following sales processes is a common gap. Sometimes, low performers skip your standard dialogue on buying or selling a product or rush through it, and this affects the customers’ interaction with your product. They might also forget to follow up on email cadences or forget to check in on leads after they have connected once. They might also give up easily or fail to prepare for calls.

It’s risky, especially since not planning the flow of a sales call may be disastrous. A customer might react in an entirely different way than you expect, and if a rep does not account for all possibilities, they might end up flustered and frustrated. There are even extreme cases where the rep calls without knowing who the prospect is, or why they are on a list for a company’s product or service.

How to address these performance gaps

In some cases, the gaps are easy to address—all you need to do is coach your sales reps through each step and retrain them as necessary. Sometimes all the rep needs to do is memorize and execute. They could also benefit from lessons on messaging techniques or conversations with clients and customers.

Sometimes, though, the gap is more complex and needs more training. For some reps, you might need to discuss the importance of sales in business while others might need to learn technical skills like mirroring. Still, others might need coaching in reading nonverbal cues or facial expressions. As the manager, it’s your duty to keep tabs on your team’s strengths and weaknesses so that you can come up with effective solutions.

If your reps have a sales conversation playbook they could follow, it would make sure all of your reps are on the same page with messaging and help them be consistent with every call. It may be a good idea to hire a sales trainer to train all of your reps, no matter their experience, and make sure everyone is up to date on the latest techniques to communicate value in their sales conversations. 

Circle back when necessary

Once a manager has identified a performance gap and coached their team on it, they usually assume that the case is closed. However, that’s not true—you must keep checking in with your trainees to see how they’re applying the skills they learn during your coaching sessions. A great way to make sure your reps are still following what they learned is by using a microlearning program. Programs such as Qstream can quiz your reps on skills they’ve learned, helping their memory stay sharp. 

Performance gaps will stay where they are if you’re not able to provide them with the feedback and sense of accountability they need to learn. You must also know how to foster relationships between pre-sales specialists, your sales team, and other sales teams in the company. Customer engagement should be as smooth on the back end as it appears from the front.

Conclusion

When a company prioritizes coaching and development, it will reap the benefits in terms of higher revenue. Your sales reps are an important human connection with your customers, so help them build rapport, close performance gaps, retain clients, and increase your team’s overall productivity.

If you are interested in investing in sales training, we would love the opportunity to be a part of the discussion on how we can partner together to help you and your team achieve your goals. The content of our training workshops is taught by a 35-year sales veteran who specializes in elevating value by understanding the science of decision-making. Every rep will walk away with mastery of a conversation framework scientifically proven to communicate high value in every conversation they have with prospects and customers.

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We understand it can be difficult to know where to start when building a framework for sales conversations, so we’ve developed a Sales Conversation “Cheat Sheet” you can download HERE.