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Boosting and improving sales team performance has been one of the most outstanding challenges facing sales representatives for most business organizations, which has remained one of the biggest challenges for sales teams.
According to a study conducted in 2012, 44% of organizations found transacting sales hard, and this number grew to 49% by 2017, and now, the question that lies here is, what could the challenge be?
According to a study conducted by pace productivity, most sales reps spend much time on administrative tasks, and only 22% is spent selling while in the field. This is so tiny compared to what is expected (50% of their time), which makes a difference between the time expected to work and the time worked.
Suppose you want your team to increase sales performance and productivity. In that case, they must understand that a lot of time has to be dedicated to selling than concentrating on administrative tasks and creating sales content (23% of their time); therefore, if you are planning to increase sales performance, then count increasing time to be spent on selling as key, perhaps it has to be much more than time spent on filing and those other administrative tasks.
Focusing on sales productivity performance refers to maximizing sales at a low cost using a few resources. This is measured only when a company’s revenue is increased, and of course, all this comes down to efficient use of your time, especially when selling.
Today, we will discuss how the best business organizations can improve sales performance and boost sales productivity to increase revenue.
• Specify your daily team goals
Nothing beats increased sales productivity and better performance like setting daily goals; setting daily goals is a driving force that helps you reach beyond your current set targets to realize full company potential growth. It also serves as a motivation. Setting goals gives you a clear direction of what you have to do from the beginning of the week until the end of it, which helps you hit your target and set goals that are realistic and achievable because challenging goals at times become complicated and tedious, thus failing to motivate the salesperson or the team. Also, soft goals are not satisfactory because many people tend to undermine them, and they don’t encourage people to perform and exceed their set goals/targets.
• Have a well-established routine guide as a team
If you are looking up to improve and increase sales performance for your team, then you need to have a routine guide to give you a direction of what should be done daily and what should not be done, what should be done first before the other(priorities), what is urgent and not urgent. This calls for things like prioritizing clients depending on who is a hot lead and is likely to stay for a long while supporting the company in terms of revenue; for example, if you have clients who have been there for a long time and are still part of your business as clients then they should be made a priority and given first-hand attention while the new ones you can always attend to them later and if possible those long-serving clients should be on your daily routine guide, I mean checking on them daily.
• Set objectives for each individual and as a team
If you are a sales manager/ team leader and want to boost sales performance for your team, you need to set and specify achievement objectives for each individual. As a team, this works more like a motivation to meet their goals because they know that in case their goals are not met, then they will be questioned; this puts them under pressure to ensure that the plans are met so that at the end of the day/week they have a clear and exciting report to put before their managers without any single failures and complaints.
• Understand your sales needs and the needs of your customers
Perhaps if you are selling and not meeting your customer’s needs, you probably waste time; the first fundamental thing to do in sales is to understand your customers' needs. Once you know your customers' needs, perform or deliver in line with what customers want, and they will be happy .to support you continuously. Still, if you give them goods/services that are not in their interest, then you are probably lost. You won’t make any sales because you are supplying something that is not of interest /not desired, and therefore, your goods won’t find the market, and neither will they move quickly as you expected.
• Hire the right sales reps
One of the biggest challenges affecting business companies/ business organizations is that they hire people without experience selling to be sales representatives. This is a wrong move because people without understanding will require massive training, which is costly regarding resources. Of course, by the time they catch up, to start making. The company will have lost some revenue, which hinders its growth and development. Hiring experienced salespeople saves time and resources since these require a few resources regarding training and other related expenses.
• Avail the right sales tools
The right sales tools include; Customer Relationship Management (CRM), one of the best CRM tools in HubSpot CRM. This helps you reduce the work that must be done, such as filing customers’ needs, capturing their data, recording their information, and all the other activities. With CRM in place, you don’t need to do all that manually because the system automatically captures that information, saving time, resources, and energy and increasing productivity in the short or long run.
• Monitor sales activities
Knowing your current financial stand as a business organization helps you make proper future financial projections; knowing how your business is performing, whether financially or in terms of sales, requires you to monitor it. Monitoring helps you understand what is working and what is not working, where there is a need for improvement, and what new strategies you think you should implement to ensure that everything runs smoothly as expected. As a business manager, if you want your sales teams to perform, then you need to monitor their activities. For example, you need to be clear about achieving the set weekly or monthly targets, watch and see whether they were met; if anyone didn’t meet their goals, then ask why did they fail? Following up with team sales activities helps you evaluate their performance and the rate at which they bring revenue into a company.
• Have a monthly training plan for the entire sales team
Most business organizations/companies train their employees once after hiring them, and then it stops there; there is nothing like additional training. One thing that sales managers and directors forget is the fact that people forget quickly, and the content is lost in a short time; therefore, managers need to set and put in place these monthly reminder training at least one day a month so that the sales teams keep the training content at the fingertips and emphasize the fact that they need to put the content into use. According to Aberdeen, 87% of the training content is forgotten within a few weeks; thus, reminder training should no longer be taken for granted but rather as a necessity for the sales team to do better.
• Feed the sales team with information and content
The sales team might not have the ability always to generate content to use while attending to customers or B2B clients; therefore, as a business organization, I feel bothered when you are bound to send some sales content to the sales team such that they can be guided upon what to do and what to say as they appear before clients. On average, salespeople spend about 30% of their time looking for sales content; this wastes a lot of their time instead of being in the field looking for clients. The least time a sales rep should spend in the field should be 50% of their time; therefore, if that time is wasted on other things, they won’t have time for the field.
• Set lead qualification requirements for your team
Setting lead qualification requirements saves your sales team time in a way that the salespeople won’t waste so much of their time on leads that they see that are likely not to qualify; for example, lead qualification requirements may help a sales rep to understand and be able to differentiate between a cold lead and a hot lead such that they can know where to put efforts and where not to waste their time, understanding which lead needs nurturing and which doesn’t require nurturing but rather just a call away.
Final thoughts and conclusion
Sales team performance is one of the most significant ways to increase business productivity and bring in more revenue; discussed above are the most common ways most business organizations employ to boost sales for a team.