7 Ways to Build a Successful Sales Team

An effective sales team ensures you meet your quotas and scale your organization in a competitive business world. Successful salespeople don’t develop their skills overnight, they need coaching and development throughout their tenure with your organization to make sure they continue to thrive. To create a successful sales team, investing in sales software and other technologies are a great start, but you also need to invest your time.

Discover seven ways to make your sales team stand out.

1. Encourage Collaboration

Healthy competition amongst colleagues many times inspires sales organizations to do great things. To do this effectively, strong leaders must bring their team together to let every member know that their roles are complementary, ensuring that they appreciate the value of working towards a common goal and doing so in solidarity.

Collaboration increases client satisfaction, encourages team players to share their best practices, and enhances mutual support. In doing so, this significantly boosts the performance of the whole team.

2. Provide Incentives

Sales people need motivation. Their responsibilities involve dealing with and managing different personalities and overcoming a barrage of objections. Top sales professionals have grit and they show up to work day in and day out and continue to overachieve.

Sales incentives work and awards for excellent performance, extra days off, and bonuses will help to keep your team motivated. Once you achieve momentum it becomes much easier to sustain a culture of belief and overachievement.

3. Hire Coachable Salespeople

Successful salespeople require continual learning and training. The business landscape changes over time, and new techniques keep emerging. Your team needs to have people who can adapt to changes and learn new skills to drive sales.

A study performed by the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science shows that the ability of salespeople to be coached and overall sales performance are positively and directly related. Therefore, ensure that this trait is a mandatory requirement during the hiring process.

4. Implement Efficient Tech Tools

Using suitable tech tools boosts the performance of the sales team by helping them to get to their full potential. Sales tools are essential to train, boost productivity, and close deals. They are available in various categories ranging from prospecting to presentation tools.

The digital age is here, and you don’t want your team left behind and undertake sales in an obsolete way that doesn’t drive sales. Successful sales teams use technology carefully to maximize its value. A strong CRM tool like Salesforce.com is required to build a successful sales team and to recruit top sales talent. Other tools to empower your sales team include Outreach, LeadIq, LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, etc.

5. Understand Variations in Your Sales Team

Successful salespeople have similar traits, but are not carbon copies of one another. Their coaching preference and learning styles will differ, as will their ability to engage with different types of prospects. Integrate one-on-one coaching to ensure every member learns in the style that suits them best.

Adjust your training and management style to accommodate the different traits among your team members. As a result, you will increase the probability of all members achieving maximum potential.

6. Give Feedback to Your Team

Let the team members know what they are doing right and what areas need to be improved. Positive criticism, too, will push them to work on their weaknesses. The feedback should be detailed and specific so that the recipient can know how to do better.

Develop a feedback culture and include it in the company policy. This way, you will enhance interpersonal relationships with your team, reduce confusion that may arise from expectations, and reinforce excellence.

7. Set Realistic Goals

Goals point the team in the direction the company is supposed to take. Center the goals on a specific sales key performance indicator (KPI) and link them to overall company goals. Ensure the goals you set are achievable.

To effectively achieve enormous goals, break them down into smaller steps that will lead you to achieve the bigger goal. In addition, you need to align the goals to the available resources to avoid straining your team.

Remember that the key to having a successful sales team starts when you recruit members and runs throughout their work lifecycle. If the team consists of high-driven individuals, you will achieve consistent success over time. Reach out to Treeline to learn more.