4 Best Strategies To Manage Your Sales Team

It is an established fact that customers are the prime pillars of an organization. It is essential for a corporation to retain their existing customers and bring in more customers for a longer lifetime value for their business. However, there is one department that plays a very important role in acting as a bridge between corporations and their customers. It is the sales department. The sales department is the bridge that either makes or breaks a deal. If your sales department is performing well, then, it is good news. The end result — you’re going to get better productivity. However, if you’re facing hiccups here and there, then it is an alarm to manage your sales team right away.

1. Are you managing a sales team for the first time?
2. Are you wondering what makes a sales team successful?
3. Do you want to know how to get your sales team performing?

If you’ve any of these above questions, you are in the right place. Managing a sales team is not a complicated job. Instead, it is more about paying attention to the smallest details, employee concerns, understanding the pressure, and taking relevant measures to overcome the challenges.

There can be several reasons why your team is underperforming. It can be due to various factors like pressure, dislike towards the job, or lack of understanding of your products or service. It is the responsibility of the sales manager to identify the challenges and provide the right solutions.

In this blog, we have listed the top 4 strategies that sales managers can use to manage their sales team and reach the sales targets effortlessly.

Top 4 Sales Team Management Strategies

1. Encourage Learning

When a new salesperson joins the sales team, it is a common practice to train the employees for a specific duration. For instance, some companies train their salespeople for a period of one month. The main purpose of this training is to avoid the common mistakes that salespeople make during calls or emails.

However, it should be noted that learning is a never-ending process, and the first step towards creating a successful sales team is encouraging continuous learning. This is because learning paves the way for individual and team growth.

According to Stats, around 55% of salespeople lack basic skills to perform sales. No company would hire an employee who doesn’t have in-depth knowledge in sales. Sales managers, along with educating themselves, should make it a priority to encourage learning among their team.

Sales Tricks:

• The sales manager can conduct training sessions every week on a particular day to share knowledge
• An education forum can be set up where people can watch videos, read articles, and interact with their peers
• A 1–1 coaching session analyzing the previous errors of a salesperson can encourage continuous learning

2. Leverage Technology

Repetitive tasks and redundancy in the workflow are the two biggest hurdles that exhaust time. Salespeople have multiple responsibilities to carry out every day. Right from collecting and analyzing leads to initiating communication — they have to stay focused.

But, how can they stay focused when they have to juggle between real-time tasks and backend paperwork? In my opinion, it puts them under a lot of pressure. Especially, if your company has targets for every salesperson, then it becomes a huge task. At one point, they will get exhausted and quit the job.

By integrating your business with a sales team management software like Apptivo, your salespeople can effortlessly crack deals and improve the conversion rate. This also functions as CRM Software by keeping track of all your customer interactions. This helps sales teams to effortlessly retrieve the relevant information and offer an instant solution to the customers or leads. Owing to the fact that CRM Software manages all your redundant tasks, your team can focus on selling your products.

Sales Tricks:

• Don’t sign up for the best sales management software. Instead, sign up for the right solution
• Try out the trial versions of multiple CRM software before choosing the right plan
• Select a plan that is more suitable for your feature requirements and avoid paying for features that you may probably never use

3. Cultivate Your Team

According to Richard Branson, “There is no magic formula for great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated”. This explains the importance of a healthy work culture.

Psychological factors play a vital role on how employees behave and react during their work hours. Hence, sales managers should understand the employees in their teams. The first step is to put complete trust in the team. They should feel comfortable in taking crucial decisions and must not shy away from taking responsibility for their actions.

In the technical aspect, the sales managers must be aware of the selling style of each salesperson. They should understand their learning graph, selling method, strengths, and weaknesses.

Furthermore, the sales managers must create a competitive environment where each salesperson is motivated to do better, incentivize their accomplishments, and be neutral in case of differences among your team members.

Sales Tricks:

• Maintain a separate database for each employee to understand the nature of selling
• Use scientific methods to measure the performance of employees
• Be unbiased and listen when there are any differences among your team members

4. Collaborate & Streamline The Process

When a proper process and protocol are in place, there are fewer chances of having confusion and breaks in the workflow. A common sales process must be there as a guide for employees to carry out their day-to-day tasks. It should also have the necessary tools for employees to reach their sales goals.

Sales managers can maintain a default tutorial database with all the information related to the process. It should be a mandatory step and every sales member has to go through this for better sales.

Even if your sales team works remotely, the members of the sales team must meet once a day through online collaboration tools to discuss their activities and achievements. A scrum meeting can be arranged to push sales faster and reach the targets at a quicker pace.

Sales Tricks:

• Let the employees be the organizer of the meetings and they can take up the position on a rotation basis
• Use an automation tool like Apptivo to streamline the sales process
• Utilize advanced metrics to track the performance of teams.

Conclusion

These are some of the best practices used by functional sales managers to reach their sales goals without any glitches. In addition to the above-listed methods, there are some industry-specific methods and procedures that will enable the sales teams to create a niche reputation for their products.