If you manage a sales team, you know how important it is to always be focused on increasing your numbers and improving your success rate. But doing so isn’t easy, especially in the current climate of economic uncertainty.
If you want to motivate your team and help them stay on track, here are four ways you can help improve your sales team’s individual and collective performance.
1. Improve Morale
While the media likes to portray salespeople as operating in a cutthroat, highly competitive industry, the shocking fact is that the best sales teams are actually the ones with the greatest sense of happiness and camaraderie. According to one researcher, a happy working environment makes sales teams significantly more productive, raising overall sales by nearly 40%.
If you want to end the year on a high note, finding ways to improve morale and give your team a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment on the job might be one way to do so.
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2. Use Lead and Sales Tracking Tools
Every team will have its high achievers, the driven personalities that seem to have the magic touch, who can put up numbers even in the most difficult circumstances, and who you can trust to always make a sale. But most of your team is going to require a little more management.
As with anything else in business, if you want things to be more efficient and effective, start measuring. Tracking the work of your team will help you see where the weak points are, and will give you the information you need to identify team members who need help.
Using lead and sales call tracking software is a great way to stay on top of your team’s performance and to pinpoint where improvements can be made.
3. Stop Cold Calling
Cold calling is one of the oldest tools in the modern sales playbook, and many experienced salespeople still swear by it as a way of reaching new customers.
But while cold calling has been shown to produce results, the percentage of cold calls that turn into actual sales is small. Some businesses say they still prefer them, but a successful cold-calling campaign takes a long time to get through to a prospect, and statistically only results in a sale around 2% of the time.
Moving away from cold calling toward more productive avenues like lead generation software and referrals is a better use of your team’s time and will lead to better performance.
4. Incentivize Success
If you want people to succeed, you need to give them a reason to. One of the reasons sales have so often relied on the commission model is that commissions are one of the most reliable ways of getting salespeople to deliver results.
But individual bonuses aren’t the only incentive, and there are good reasons to think about incentives more broadly — in particular, by rewarding your team for working together. Friendly competition can be a good thing, but creating a sense of communal responsibility for overall results can help you give your team ownership over the drive for greater productivity.
Heading toward the last quarter of 2020, many sales teams are eager to end this turbulent year on a strong note. If you want to enhance their performance even more, incorporating these four strategies into your management plan will help you deliver concrete results.
