5 Big-Picture Tips for Sales and Support Teams
Featured guest article by Misa Chien, Co-Founder of Praiseworthy and one of LinkedIn’s 2017 “Top 10 Voices” in Social Media and Marketing.
A big determining factor in whether a business thrives is the quality and efficiency of your sales and support teams. Building a sustainable, successful team is a group effort. However, as a leader, you’ll have an especially important role in helping your team grow.
Your two most important goals in this process are to equip your team to make great sales, and to provide a positive working environment that offers quality training and enables them to thrive. These two factors have a big impact on each other: the better trained your team is, the more sales they’ll make; and the more sales they make, the more positive morale they’ll likely experience in the workplace. Here are five important tips for sales and support teams.
- Show Appreciation.
Make sure your employees know that you care and that you recognize all of their hard work. Think up your best employee appreciation ideas and include them as a regular part of your company culture. Regular office activities and rewards not only boost morale, but they empower your team to work that much more effectively. Focus on providing more work-life balance, offering perks like gift cards to local restaurants, and making time for fun in the office.
Put a high priority on training and on providing a clear set of company goals and rules so employees know when they’re succeeding. Show employees that you’re dedicated to their advancement by offering professional development opportunities and regularly updating their training to reflect changes in the industry.
Also be sure to assign work that aligns with each individual team member’s strengths and preferences. While you may have a few employees that are especially great at making sales, aim to give quality opportunities to every employee so that they feel valued and know that they’re being given a chance to succeed.
2. Remember that management and hiring are not one-size-fits-all.
As any manager knows, running a team can mean working with many different types of personalities at any given time. Use this to your advantage and adapt your management style and team goals to the individual needs of your company. Think about what makes individual employees most motivated, and use that to help them thrive.
When interviewing potential hires, don’t just ask yourself whether they’d be a quality employee in general. You’ll also want to consider what their specific strengths are, and how those qualities would fit within your overall team. Also be sure to try to gauge whether the potential employee is good at taking constructive criticism, because that’s an important part of a team’s success. Before you conduct interviews, think about what your company needs most so you’ll notice those traits in your interviewees. Once you have your team in place, make sure sales reps understand exactly what you expect from them, how to achieve they can achieve it, and which metrics equate to success.
3. Make your customers feel seen.
This one might seem like a given, but it can be easy to forget when you’re heavily focused on running your team. Treat your customers with kindness, and they’ll likely keep returning to your company. Remind your team to speak to customers with a caring tone, and to offer up genuine concern for their well-being rather than robotic or heavily scripted lines.
The root of the work you do has to do with considering what solutions you can provide your customers. Keep that priority at the front of your mind when interacting with consumers, and you’ll likely see your sales grow. A good example of this is MyQ Solutions’ approach to solving customers’ problems. MyQ Solutions’ printer and copier management software offers a swift option for saving customers time and money, and frees up more energy for employees to focus on their true strengths. MyQ’s software also beefs up file security, which goes above and beyond by offering customers a solution to a very important problem they often don’t initially realize they have. That’s the type of model you might want to keep in mind when considering your own company (and GDPR compliance).
4. Know your most important metrics.
Just as it’s important to have transparent metric goals for your sales team, it’s also vital to know just what all those metrics mean. As you track statistics about your company over time, you’ll start to notice certain trends. Perhaps churning customers only spend a few minutes on your service’s software login page, whereas loyal customers spend an hour on that page each month.
Once you’re able to identify which metrics offer up particularly important details, you can track them closely. You can also use these metrics to course-correct if you determine that certain approaches aren’t working, and to identify customers you’re at risk of losing while there is still an opportunity to keep them on board.
In addition to the data points that stand out from the get-go, take some time to consider what you’d most like the company to accomplish or change. Then, think about which data metrics can help you determine how to make that happen.
5. Encourage teamwork.
Many of your sales employees may tap into their competitive sides to regularly meet goals and succeed. That said, competition doesn’t mean that employees can’t work together as a team, both to meet sales goals and to build a better workplace. Posting team members’ recent deals and accomplishments somewhere in the office encourage work ethic, both as a group and individually. When you set high goals for your team and encourage them to make things happen while creating a sense of limitless possibility.
About the author:
Misa Chien is the co-founder of Praiseworthy, a customer service blog helping small businesses improve their customer service. With resources ranging from how to get Google reviews for your business, to subscribing to get free weekly customer service quotes, the Praiseworthy blog has amassed over 5,000 customer service evangelist subscribers from around the world.
