Building a sales team isn’t an easy task to accomplish. Especially since you want to build one that’s effective at closing sales and driving revenue. Managing or building a sales team will always be a significant challenge for small business owners. If you haven’t worked with a sales team before, you may not know what you are in for!
This article contains some of the best expert tips to help you build your sales team. It is based on the experience and knowledge of experts in the field. According to them, here are ten rules that you must follow when building a successful sales team.
No. 1: Be results-driven
Your team has to be made of people with determination and drive. You need to create a transparent environment with key sales metrics being the primary orientation. Putting competitive people in a group to work together within a transparent environment will help drive your organization in the right direction. Activity is not productivity. So, you must emphasize outcomes and results.
No. 2: Know what you need where you are
Building a sales team requires that you know the category that people you’re hiring fall into. Are they builders or growers? Builders will start with nothing and grow from scratch, while growers are effective after everything has been set. Many people are bad at both. So you have to know what your organization needs at the stage you are in. This will determine who you hire, builders, or growers?
No. 3: Manage expectations well
You should make sure your team is excited and support them with whatever you can. Over-performance is pretty evident for everyone to see. But it’s hard to point out what under-performance is or what it looks like. What are you comfortable with? Someone who gives 90% consistently or someone who gives 150% this month and 50% the next month?
No. 4: Coachability is key
Your hires should be able to take feedback positively. You can gauge this with a role play where they hold a demo for your company’s product. You can then ask them if they think they did well. Afterward, it would be best to give them your feedback. Don’t just grade them on how well they did in the demo. Consider their openness to self-assessment and how they take and apply feedback.
No. 5: Set a high standard
When you set a very high and achievable sales goal, your sales team has something that they believe is worth pursuing. You have to instill the belief in them that anything is possible. If you are only able to achieve just 70% of a high goal, you would be doing better than meeting up with 100% of a low or mediocre goal.
No. 6: Incentivize your team
Adding incentives to work always gives that extra vibe to work. You could get a dashboard in your office to show live feeds of close deals for each sales team member. This brings about transparency in your team and organization, motivates them, and adds a sense of urgency to work.
No. 7: Training matters
A culture you must develop is that of continuous learning as you are building a sales team. You must invest in professional development and training for your sales team. There should be a regular training cadence to consistently establish the fundamentals of prospecting, competitive intelligence, and territory planning. Other training topics include product knowledge, professional communications, and opportunities management.
No. 8: Use the volume-to-value ratio
Your most valuable people should spend their time on a low volume of work but with high importance. This includes securing partnerships, referrals, and relationship building. While the lower value people focus on the high volume tasks such as making prospects out of leads. Do the same for your leads by chasing a few but highly prospective leads.
No. 9: There’s not one single solution for all problems
There are different types of personalities under you. You have a role to mentor and enable them. You have to protect them from bad sales behavior or internal politics and make it easy to focus on their job for more success. They are different people and should be managed differently. Find out what motivates each person and help push them to their limits to be better salespersons on your journey of building a sales team.
No. 10: Specialize early to boost your sales
You can’t treat members of your sales team the same way. Create groups based on strengths and preferences. Are they better at dealing with small businesses, or they prefer large organizations? What sectors do they understand better than the rest? Divide your prospects into groups and divide your sales team based on their strengths to address your prospects. Do this as you grow.
Conclusion
Building a sales team to be a successful one is not a day’s job. You have to be deliberate about it, and it starts with your hiring or onboarding process. Go for what you want in your team.
