5 key steps to developing a high-performing sales team
Written by Chris Norton | 4th September 2024
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Sales teams are responsible for finding and retaining clients. Since they are every company’s revenue engine, if they are ineffective, all other areas of the business will also be affected. Reaching your business goals and bottom line also becomes challenging if this engine isn’t running optimally.
Building a strong sales team is possible with the right decisions and consistent adaptation. Whether you’re a sales manager or a business owner seeking to boost sales revenue, these five steps will help you build sales team success.
1. Define Sales Strategies
An effective sales strategy is the first step toward building sales team success. It encompasses the goals, actions, and decisions that guide your team to effectively position products and attract new customers. Ideally, you want an inbound and outbound sales strategy for your team:
- Inbound sales strategy – This strategy covers leads who already know about your brand and have reached out to find out more. Since inbound leads are warmer than outbound leads, create a strategy to educate and nurture them.
- Outbound sales strategy – This strategy covers prospects who don’t know about your brand and what you offer. It involves reaching out to prospects through social media, cold calling, and emails and convincing them that your products and services are a good fit.
To ensure effective sales strategies, base them on your overall sales goals. Assume your aim is to boost your customer acquisition rate. As part of your inbound sales strategy, you could send informative emails to your subscribers. A good outbound sales strategy for that sales goal is to invest in Facebook ads.
Good sales goals should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. This will help give your sales team a clear sense of direction. An example of a SMART sales goal may be “To increase monthly sales revenue by 10% in 14 months.” Other SMART sales goal examples include:
- To lower customer acquisition cost by 10% in 14 months
- To increase customer acquisition rate by 10% in 14 months
- To shorten the sales cycle to 4.5 weeks in one month.
Don’t forget to determine your specific key performance indicators as well. Here are sample sales KPIs:
- Sales revenue
- Customer acquisition cost
- Customer acquisition rate
- Length of sales cycle
Studies show that sales professionals spend only 21% of their time actually selling. The rest of their time is taken up by other mundane tasks. With clearly defined sales strategies, you enable your sales reps to do more in less time. In the end, you’ll have not just an experienced sales team but also one that boasts high sales productivity and closes more deals. Ultimately, you can expect higher sales revenues.
This doesn’t mean you should rely only on robust sales strategies to ensure a high-performing sales team. Complement these strategies with other tactics for the best results.
For instance, to help your team achieve your sales goals, you can also leverage effective PR services offered by experienced public relations professionals. These PR professionals will help ensure good public perception of your brand that will facilitate sales. Another option is to hire a good SEO agency. The company can help enhance your online visibility, making it easy for your sales team to generate leads.
You should also make it easy for prospects to reach your team if they have questions about products, of course. Prospects should be able to contact them using their preferred channel–whether voice, email, chat, SMS, or social. Leverage an excellent contact center solution that allows your team to pick up conversations across all these channels from a single platform. That will help ensure personalized communications for the best sales results.
2. Map out Needed Skills
To build a successful sales team, you must follow a strategic hiring process. Analyze your current sales team. You’ll need to identify their sales skills.
With this skills analysis, you’ll be able to see the skill set gaps in your current sales team you need to fill. Then you can tailor your hiring strategies to attract talent with the specific sales know-how your current team lacks.
Let’s say your entire sales team is made up of young workers who excel in selling but don’t know how to generate leads. You’ll need to hire sales specialists with years of experience in lead generation to complement them. With this strategy, you can ensure your sales team has all the sales skills needed. All members will be able to contribute to building sales team success.
Apart from lead generation, here are other sales skills your team should have overall:
- Prospecting
- Active listening
- Negotiation
- Problem-solving
- Presentation
When hiring, look for soft skills like time management, teamwork, and a positive attitude as well. An individual with these soft skills will also have the work ethic needed to succeed in the workplace. They’ll have an easier time working with their colleagues, too.
3. Create a Video Sales Playbook
An optimized sales process helps you improve your operations by ensuring your sales reps deliver a consistent customer experience. The sales process refers to all the steps a sales representative takes to move a lead through the sales funnel—from prospecting, connecting with prospects, researching, and closing a sale. Following a consistent sales cycle helps you replicate sales results and achieve repetitive outcomes.
So, to ensure the best sales results, don’t just promote your products with video content that considers relevant video trends.
Another pro tip is to create employee training videos that map out the sales methodology. Keep in mind, though, that your sales process might change over time. That means you’ll also have to update your video sales playbook as needed. Both seasoned sales professionals and budding sales reps will require this guidance to deliver.
4. Onboard Your New Sales Team Members
Remember when I said you’ll need to hire members with skills that complement those of your existing sales reps? Well, once you’ve completed your automated recruitment process and have your new sales reps, you’ll need to warm them up to your company and the rest of the team.
The first few weeks of their employment should be allotted to offline or remote employee training. Show them your video sales playbook. Offer other onboarding videos and articles to help them understand your brand, client base, and how you serve them.
5. Establish a Healthy Company Culture
A healthy working environment unleashes employee potential, boosting their efficiency and sales productivity. This kind of environment also nurtures a culture of innovation in the sales workplace. You can create a healthy company culture in multiple ways:
- Encourage open communication
- Establish transparency
- Recognize new sales team needs and work to address them
- Provide professional development opportunities and courses
- Offer salary increases
- Identify, recognize and reward sales team achievements
In addition, ensure that the entire team is supportive of new hires and each other. You can do this by also formally recognizing members’ actions that promote collaboration.
A healthy corporate culture doesn’t just help you build sales team success. It also boosts employer branding, allowing you to attract top talent who can contribute to your sales efforts.
Moreover, a positive company culture ensures you retain your current employees. That means you can save on costs associated with hiring fresh talent.
Conclusion
A sales team is the revenue engine of any company. That’s why building sales team success is important. A high-performing sales team ensures your business growth.
We explored the five steps to take to develop an effective team.
Begin by defining your sales strategies. Map out your current sales team’s skills to determine the new recruits to add for the best sales results. Create a video sales playbook that institutionalizes your sales process. Teach your new recruits your branding and the sales process to follow when handling leads. Finally, foster a healthy company culture. This will enable your sales reps to thrive in the workplace.
Now go boost your sales performance with your high-performing sales team. Good luck!
Author's bio
Chris Norton is the host of Embracing Marketing Mistakes, a UK Top 10 marketing podcast that celebrates marketing fails, and the founder of award-winning B2C specialist PR agency Prohibition. His social media training blog is listed in the UK’s top 10 PR blogs. For tons of digital PR tips, you can follow Chris here @chris_norton.
