When your company hits its sales goals, profitability and morale run high. Life at your organization is good, and employees across the firm are optimistic for the future. Success like this doesn’t just happen by accident. It occurs through hiring and developing a top-notch sales team. It happens when you have the right salespeople in the right roles with the aptitude and propensity to perform as the selling environment demands and are surrounded by a thriving culture that supports their success. Let’s explore how to cultivate the sales talent you need for your company to enjoy lasting prosperity.
The Cost of an Ineffective Sales Team
Before we dive into the strategy to assemble a winning sales team, we need to face a hard truth. An ineffective sales team will keep your organization from reaching revenue targets and could ultimately devastate the firm financially. Failing to close enough deals obviously hurts the company’s bottom line – and is, sadly, more common than you may think. According to HubSpot, two-thirds of sales associates miss the mark. But did you also know that your company will spend an average of $100,000 and six months on replacing sales representatives that leave the organization?
Unfortunately, a poor performer can keep negatively impacting your firm long after they’re gone. It’s not just lost sales, a poor performer impacts the productivity of the sales manager and can negatively impact team morale just as hard. Fortunately, when you understand why your sales associates don’t deliver, you can craft a plan to ensure that failure is less likely to happen in the future. In general, most sales representatives wash out of your company because they lacked one (or more) of several things: motivation, sales skills, training, guidance, or product knowledge.
Here’s what you can do about it.
Grow Sales by Growing Your Sales Team
Knowing what spells doom for an individual salesperson can help you create a hiring and training program that mitigates the risk of those pitfalls. A winning sales team is grown one sales representative at a time. And, as you foster the skills and attitudes required for success within each of them, they will grow together as a cohesive and driven sales powerhouse.
To get those results, your sales cultivation program should do the following:
- Establish a sales culture
- Deploy modern tools to do the job
- Incorporate intentional hiring practices focused on key sales traits
- Onboard new sales representatives thoroughly
- Set attainable but challenging goals
- Provide ongoing training and mentorship
- Give regular and detailed feedback
- Recognize individual and team accomplishments
Let’s discuss each item.
Establish a Sales Culture
There’s a lot of literature out there that supports the benefits of a good company culture. Your sales team should have its own. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A short statement of the values your team shares works just fine. Be sure it’s not just words on paper that came out of the last sales management book you read. Engage your sales team in identifying and agreeing upon which values matter most to them. You’ll want to all agree and uphold the values that differentiate your company’s brand, your client’s experience and will ultimately lead to your sales success.
Your sales culture will help align everyone on the team and keep members motivated. The shared values will ensure a more consistent experience for your customers. You and your team should do everything in accordance with the sales culture you establish, and members of the sales team should share openly and hold each other accountable to your established values. When stress piles up, and numbers are hard to hit, values are often pushed aside; especially if they’re viewed as just words on paper. As the leader, set the tone to make it OK for all to hold each other accountable for upholding these values and speaking up when things go off track.
Deploy Modern Tools
It’s tough to close deals when the technology your team uses is slow, hard to use, or flat-out doesn’t work. 42% of sales reps say they don’t have enough information before making a call. Sales reps spend 440 hours each year trying to find the right content to share with their prospects and clients. Make their jobs easier by purchasing and providing modern tools that help them efficiently track customers, prospects, and sales conversations, along with sales enablement playbooks, and organized content marketing. Any technology investment should be focused on decreasing new hire ramp-up time to full productivity, and increasing the productivity of your existing reps.
Hire Intentionally
Using your sales culture, think about the ideal sales representative. Write your job description and advertisement based on that ideal. Of course, you may need to be flexible so that you’re not endlessly chasing unicorns. Hire with intention, so there’s a greater chance of culture fit.
As you consider what your next hires need to look like, take a close look at your existing sales team, your target markets, and your clients to determine what gaps you need to fill. What personality traits or specific skills will take your team to the next level? John F. Kennedy once said a rising tide lifts all boats. He was speaking about the economy. I believe this applies to sales teams too. Every person you hire should bring something new to your mix that takes the whole team up a notch.
Onboard Thoroughly
Your new sales associates will need lots of personal attention early on to set them up for success. Besides the typical human resources content, your onboarding should include:
- A review of the sales culture and how it impacts the sales process
- In-depth training on the company’s products and services
- A discussion about learning and recognition preferences
- A close look at the sales process/sales playbook so they know where to go to find on-going support once they are active in market
A thorough onboarding helps new sales associates feel welcome and engaged. It also gets them familiar with what they’re selling and how they’re expected to sell it.
Set Attainable, Challenging Goals
Sales goals are necessary to drive production and measure achievement. They must be set strategically. You want sales representatives to feel challenged enough to make them work hard and to stave off boredom or apathy. What you don’t want is to set the bar impossibly high. If you do, both sales and morale will go down, and you won’t hit your goals. As a rule of thumb, most of your sales associates should be able to hit their targets. These targets should be aligned with overall organizational growth goals that are attainable, inspiring and ultimately something everyone will feel a sense of celebratory pride when the majority of the team achieves them.
Provide Ongoing Training and Mentorship
All that time you spend onboarding your new hires can quickly go out the door if you don’t provide an on-going method for training, skill development and coaching. 84% of sales training is forgotten in the first 3 months. Robust onboarding lays a solid foundation, but it’s not enough. You must provide ongoing training and mentorship to keep your sales team growing. Your training and development plan should include:
- Group training to reiterate basic but essential sales skills – and introduce new ones
- Private coaching to work on specific sales situations and issues
- Mentorship opportunities for seasoned representatives to share best practices with new members of the team
- Encouragement to seek development opportunities outside of the office
Establish a cadence of weekly sales huddles to share wins, discuss challenges, and set short term goals and focus points. Also, take the time to hold regular cross-functional meetings with sales, service, marketing and operations with a similar agenda item as your sales huddle. Providing an environment of on-going communication and cross-development gives everyone an opportunity to grow in their profession while building a team climate of shared goals and focus.
Give Regular, Detailed Feedback
Your sales associates need to know what they’re doing right so they can do more of it – and what they’re doing wrong so they change it. That insight comes from your regular, detailed feedback. Make it a point to speak to each sales representative on a set schedule of one-on-one’s and build plenty of opportunity for sales call observation. Build out time in one-on-one’s that goes beyond reviewing deals and pipeline health. Use these meetings to also establish and review development goals – both personal and professional. This is your time to get to know what inspires and motivates every sales rep, and can also help uncover what’s getting in their way whether it be a skill or mindset gap.
Recognize Accomplishments
When an individual sales associate or the entire team does well, celebrate it. Show them that you’re proud of them and appreciate their contribution. Recognition will make them feel good and motivate them to replicate that feeling by achieving more success. Be sure to understand what type of recognition motivates each individual. Some reps are motivated by group praise and all-company recognition while others would rather shrink under a rug if that happened to them. Sending a personal handwritten note can go just as far with one individual as a shout out on a company call.
Final Thoughts
Your sales team drives the financial success of your organization. To have an effective selling machine, you must identify the right talent, put it where it will thrive, and continue to develop it. The sales leader is the thermostat that sets the climate for the sales team, cultivates the growth of the team and the success of each sales rep. Commitment to establishing these practices creates the soil and foundation for your team to hit goals and thrive together.
How Omnia Can Help
With insight from Omnia’s quick and easy behavioral assessment, you can leverage your sales talent to the fullest. You’ll gain useful insights that will enable you to coach, train, and motivate each member of your team more effectively. Assessment data also helps you put team members in the position that they’re best suited for. Plus, you can administer the sales assessment test to job candidates to ensure you’re hiring a solid fit with your sales culture.
In addition, this sales personality test, or sales style report, will show you which of 17 sales styles each team member falls into. For example, your procedural sales representatives appreciate structure, are extremely analytical, and never miss a detail. On the other hand, your visionary sales associates are bold and decisive and like to forge their own path.
Knowing which style each salesperson identifies with is key to putting them in the best possible position to succeed. Plus, it’s fun, fast, and will get your team excited about their development – and their future with your firm. Contact us to get started today!
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