How to Get the Most From Your Sales Team

Your sales people are the driving force of your business — nurturing your existing customers and converting new prospects. So how do you build and motivate a sales team to ensure you maximise its potential and get the best results?

Pick a good Team

Employ only the best performers with proven skills, and then, supporting and working closely with them, providing the best resources, training and opportunities, you’ll potentially get a lot more sales. If you give that same support and attention to poor achievers, you may get a few more sales. Do you want a lot or a few?

Money, Money, Money

Being motivated by money is no bad thing. When you get someone that says ‘I am going to bust my butt to make these sales and get the commission’, that’s a good thing. You need sales people that are hungry, you can usually help people like that develop better skills and processes, but it can be much more challenging to develop that ‘hunger’ mindset.

Proper Use

Highly skilled, successful sales pros should obviously be spending a large percentage of their work hours selling. This means relieving them of as much of everything else as you can, and furnishing them with a stable system that includes vital marketing and sales tools, including all the functionality and custom reporting they will need.

Get the Motivation Right

People are motivated by a variety of different things. It can be difficult for managers to create an environment that works for everyone, so you have to take respective personalities into account. Most individuals are driven by one of the by the two strongest human emotions…fear and desire. So whether it’s fear of failure or a desire to achieve, you have to understand what floats whose boat.

Rewards

Pay incentives are an important driver, usually in the form of commission and bonuses. However, support and recognition is also vital. Be specific in your praise if you want to encourage staff to reach particular goals, and public pats on the back can be good for morale.

Put the Whip Away

Be aware of situations that will demotivate your salespeople, such as constantly challenging them and not praising achievements. Solely ruling through fear could be a negative way of management, that’s not to say it can’t be useful, a stick as well as a carrot are frequently useful. Anything that disrupts their equilibrium, such as new pay schemes, or suddenly increasing targets, among other surprises, is a sure way to decrease your salespeople’s appetite for success.

Goals and targets

The setting of objectives must be done in consultation with the team themselves. Aims should be easy to understand and achievable. Get them involved and work out what is reasonable. If you set ambitious targets you should acknowledge that things could get tough.

Clear Communication

You can impart an agenda to a group of people, and they will possibly all come away with a different message. The art of communication is conveying your ideas so that everyone can understand without ambiguity. So, when giving instructions you must check that all staff have received the correct information and are singing from the same song sheet, so to speak.

Remember, communication also works both ways, the people doing the selling usually have the closest contact with customers, so, feedback from sales staff is extremely valuable, and should always be used to help formulate company strategies.