Your sales team can be some of the most important people in your company. They have direct communication with customers and you will often look to them to drive results that you can use to grow the company. If you think you need to work on your sales team, here are some of the things you can do to build a better one!
Give Them the Right Tools
A bad workman will always blame their tools, so you need to make sure that you have the right ones waiting for them to use. You need to make sure that your team has all the tools that they need to be able to produce the results that you expect of them.
Try to identify some of the issues that you currently have with your systems, and then find the right pieces of software to be able to address these concerns. For example, you might want to have your sales team work from home, as this allows them to have a flexible working day. This digital sales tool means that they will be able to get set up quickly so they are able to start making calls and sales as soon as possible. There is a digital sales tool to meet every concern that you might have – you just need to track down the ones your team needs the most!
Have Achievable Goals
Sales targets are standard regardless of your industry. While you want to push your team to be able to deliver the best results possible, you also need to make sure that you have a realistic set of goals for them to meet. If you have a threshold that is just too high, your sales team is never going to be able to reach it regardless of how skilled they are.
When building your team, it might be a good idea to look at their own individual strengths and weaknesses. Setting goals for each of them individually in addition to those for the whole team might be a good idea to consider. This will allow you to ensure that you are going to meet the targets you need to see as a company. However, you will also be able to ensure that the members of your sales team are also flourishing in their roles.
Hire the Right Candidates
You need to make sure that you are bringing on the right people from the very beginning, and that means finding the people you need during recruitment. This does not always mean that you have to find the next sales prodigy on paper – many people are good at sales but might not have the formal experience yet to back up their natural abilities.
Make sure that you have a good set of interview questions to ask them to ensure that they will be able to think quickly on their feet. Improvisation tasks such as “sell me this pen” and other unusual activities can force a candidate to think creatively and will give you a really good insight into how they work. It is also imperative that you find candidates who can demonstrate a good working knowledge of your company, industry, and products at interview. This means that you will have less to do to get them up to speed with the company, and can instead look to how you can hone their skills as a salesperson.
Offer Them Support Through Training
Even your best salesperson can be even better – you just need to make sure that they are getting the training to do so! You should keep your sales team up to date with some of the latest tips and tricks to give them more in their arsenal to use when closing a killer deal. With the right learning by their side, your sales team will only be able to push to drive even better results.
This could be training that you deliver in-house, or it could be courses and conferences that you send them to where they can learn more from the best in the business. Sales techniques change with trends as much as anything else in modern life, so it is important that your team is able to keep up. You want to be in a position where you can be certain that they will be able to confidently negotiate a deal regardless of who the other party might be.
Build Your Perfect Team
A sales team needs to be able to consistently deliver good results. While this should not always be the path you follow, you should make it clear to them that you will fire them if they are not performing to the minimum standard you expect. With a good sales team behind you, your business will see growth unlike anything you could imagine. Start building your dream sales team today!