Ten Tips to Improve Performance of your Sales Team

This is set one of a series of sales tips with the purpose to give you tools you can use on a regular basis to improve and maintain the performance of your Sales Team.
1. Focus on accomplishment and progress toward Sales Goals.
Watch the News Media and what you will find is a lot of bad news on a regular basis, which can give your sales team a built in excuse for everything that is wrong in your company or with your team. It is extremely important that you keep your team focused on their goals in spite of the daily barriers and bad news.
Instead, focus on key accomplishments on a regular basis. Keep your team’s attention on the goals and the things that are going right towards achieving those goals. A sales team that is happy and has their attention on creating new sales will actually create more sales and revenue than a sales team that is unhappy and sad about how bad everything is. As long as you are making progress toward your goals on a regular basis, you can withstand the challenges of a tough economy. The key is to recognize and acknowledge what you are achieving.
2. Keep your sales team motivated through alignment of their personal goals.
Each of your employees has their own personal goals that somehow do align with the overall goals of your sales team. Find out what they are and be interested in those goals and how they align with the overall goals of the sales team.
Knowing this, you can continue to align the progress being made by the team with each individual team members goals. In this way the team stays motivated and focused through both the good and the tough times.
3. Free up your sales team member’s attention so they can put 100% of their resources towards selling!
Each sales team member only has so many units of attention. The more things they have attention on, the less attention will be on creating new sales and revenue. If you think about the sales cycle in terms of a pipeline you will see that there are potential prospects that “flow in” to the company. Those potential prospects get given to the sales team member to enlighten them on your products and services and close them to actually purchase them. They complete the transaction; get the order processed and any goods shipped out. If along the way, at any point, a sale gets stopped or hung up, then the sales team member handling it will have some of his units of attention stuck on that to some degree. These add up and pretty soon you’re sales team member is not able to give each new sale his all.
To increase sales, you must increase the amount of “attention units” each of your sales team members has. The first thing to look for is incomplete sales orders, incomplete administration of sales that were completed previously. Find all of them and get them completed, thus freeing up flows and allowing new prospects to come in.
4. Ensure transition of the customer from Sales to your Delivery Team is smooth.
A very key point for your sales team is to be able to route their completed sales to the Delivery team with total confidence. The last thing you want is your sales people worried about the delivery of your products and/or services to their customers. Your sales people need to be focused on the next sale, of course!
An exercise drill you can do for this is to have your sales people make a list of any customers they are worried about and why. Then make sure that worry is removed by getting those items dealt with. Also you can inspect your delivery department for any incomplete or stopped orders and get them immediately resolved.
5. Drill your sales team regularly
All professionals have one thing in common, they continually practice their profession. This is no different for sales people. In order to keep their sales skills sharp, they must be made to practice on a regular basis.
Have one team member play the role of the customer and the other team member sells them your product. The person playing the role of the customer should bring up realistic objections to purchasing your products or services and the one playing the role of the sales person should handle those objections smoothly and efficiently. If there are any hesitations or problems that come up in this exercise, make sure to get the information needed to fully help the sales person be able to handle these types of objections smoothly in the future. By having your sales team members do this exercise at least 20 minutes per day, they will keep improving their skills and be able to handle any scenario efficiently and effectively.
6. Review and revamp your sales tools and use your technical or delivery team to support your sales.
Find out if each of your sales personnel are using the same sales tools (Power points, whitepapers, case studies, testimonials, spec sheets etc.). Gather everything they are using and read through them as if you are the customer. Most likely, you will find that the content in the sales tools is not up to par, incorrect, having incorrect messages or even pushing potential clients away for some reason. If any of these are the case, get them corrected immediately and get your sales team drilled on how to use the new sales tools in the most efficient and effective way.
Make sure your sales team are utilizing your technical or deliver team to help support their sales; they can help in the creation of the presentation itself or in the sales call or visit. This has an added benefit of your sales staff being able to improve their product knowledge with every presentation. This use of your technology personnel is a very good team building exercise and will create goodwill and a lot more understanding between your sales and delivery team as well.
7. Research your potential customer prior to initial contact.
We would all agree that with the information available on the internet, you should be able to create quite a profile for your potential customer prior to contacting them. Even though we seem to know this, it is still not done as standard procedure. Ensure your sales people do their homework and fully research their potential customer, to find out as much information as possible to support the initial contact.
Another resource that you have is your existing clients. When researching a potential client, find out who knows them. Who does business with them? Do you have clients in common? Do you use the same vendors? Do very thorough research through your network of clients and vendors. Most everyone is eager to help you, especially if they are happy with your products and services.
8. Use endorsements and testimonials to support initial contact of potential clients.
Would you make a major purchase or decision without checking with a friend or colleague? Most executives or business owners wouldn’t. People listen to other people they know and this is exactly why having endorsements and testimonials is absolutely vital and ideally from companies and executives that your potential client respects. Who does your potential client respect? Find this out as part of your client research.
9. Ensure your testimonials tell the full story of RESULTS.
We have all read and seen thousands of testimonials like this: “I had a great experience with company X and would recommend them to anyone”. This kind of testimonial or endorsement is ok but will not make your company stand out from your competition.
Your testimonial must tell a story. The story must be of the clients experience before and after they used your service. There must be a DRAMATIC difference between the time your client started with your product or service and what they experienced after using your product or service. This story must be told in such a way that the reader can relate to it and would want the same results. The more stories you have like this, the better.
In summary, these basic tips used as part of your standard procedure can be effective in continuous improvement of your sales and sales team. We encourage you to use them.
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