Changes in the structure of businesses and the preferences of their owners are happening at the speed of light in the global market.
As a sales manager, one of your biggest concerns is how to increase your team’s output.
The key to leading the sales department toward productivity is careful planning and optimization of time management, familiarity with the most appropriate structure, and the ability to keep up with the pace and motivation.
Here are four ways to help you achieve that and build a more efficient sales team.
Table of Contents
1. Help Your Team Members Improve Their Skills
To meet the market’s demands, both team leaders and the team must be well-trained and skilled.
One key to success is knowing how to keep the sales team solid and motivated. Invest in high-quality leadership courses to help your team leaders learn how to motivate the members of their teams and make them more productive.
It all rests on the principle that people will dedicate themselves to a job to the greatest extent possible if it is a good fit for their abilities, values, and objectives.
One thing that the company should think about is how to communicate its expectations to its employees or how to positively monitor their actions.
True motivation often lies in the ability of the employee to improve their skills, grow personally and professionally and progress in their career.
Ideally, a salesperson would be an expert not only on the product they are selling but also on the type of client they will be targeting and the quirks of the region in which they operate.
Companies that try to grow and make their salespeople more efficient should provide regular training.
This has multiple benefits, including making employees feel like they’re valued members of the company who deserve attention and development and helping each individual grow into a more confident performer in their job duties.
It’s also good to provide your sales team with education, training, courses, formal and informal team-building activities, etc.
2. Invest in Job Satisfaction
For a salesperson to be productive, it’s essential to contribute to their emotional benefits on top of their professional ones. Workers’ well-being is crucial for the success of any company.
If you motivate and keep them happy, your team members will feel more connected to the company. And when they identify with the organization they represent, employees’ involvement will naturally grow.
Clear goals are also crucial for job satisfaction. In addition to the team’s overall mission, each sales team member should also have personal objectives.
If you want a more productive sales team, one of the most important things you can do is give your employees more flexibility and leeway regarding when they work.
Automating repetitive tasks will allow your team members to stay focused and perform their job to the best of their abilities.
3. Automate Sales and Additional Time-Consuming Tasks
When it comes to a sales team, the phrase “time is money” is more accurate than ever.
This is why it’s so important to eliminate unnecessary, repetitive, and manual tasks to maximize time through automation.
Automating such tasks is one of the biggest perks of technological advancements for companies.
Providing your team with sales automation tools for platforms designed for businesses, like LinkedIn, or other software solutions that make the sales process more efficient, is a great way to improve their productivity, allowing them to focus on more critical aspects of their job, such as communicating with clients, closing sales, preparing proposals, getting paid, and so on.
4. Establish a Good Plan and Stay Organized
As the head of commercial operations, you need to think about organizing your company’s sales team. The outcomes are certainly more likely to improve with proper organization.
Therefore, you need to know how to structure your sales force geographically, by product, and by type of client to make the most of your company’s sales strategy.
One idea connected to the efficiency of the sales force is strategic commercial action planning. Some practices that facilitate effective planning include:
- Establishing clear goals that are specific, attainable, measurable, and subject to deadlines (in other words, SMART goals).
- Thinking ahead to achieve your immediate goals. This will help you adhere to your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly plans.
- Keeping an annual or quarterly calendar you can add indicated dates.
- Prioritizing tasks to get everything done on time. To properly set priorities, you should think about how soon you need to get started, how much time each task will take, how important it is, and how much you enjoy doing each of them.
In a Nutshell
Being more efficient, result-driven, and team-oriented is the holy grail of any effective sales team or salesperson.
And to achieve this, as a team leader, you should stay organized, focus on your employees’ satisfaction, allow them to grow professionally, and make their job easier.
- Consulting for Change: How Change Management Experts Drive Growth and Innovation - September 8, 2023
- ChatGPT Prompts – 4 Sources of Inspiration - April 7, 2023
- The Savvy Marketing Agency Guide to Wild Growth in 2023 - January 23, 2023
Skills improvement is so big in this process. The inside sales job I worked 20 years ago at a software company offered almost weekly training it seemed. We were skilled, learning and evolving. That software reseller is now the largest company in the USA owned by a minority women. She is worth well over 3 billion and in truth, followed so many simple business fundamentals for a long, long time, to get there. Fabulous post.