The best sales managers are accountable for their team’s performance. Expecting a team to be hitting quotas month after month is no small ask, so you should be giving your salespeople the resources that they need to meet expectations consistently.
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Organize Leads Systematically
Make it easy for people to prioritize the leads that they should be focusing on. Use a platform that gives salespeople access to detailed information about customers and stay on top of each step in your business’ sales process.
What is customer data platform technology and how will it make your team members’ work easier? You can use a platform to assign different leads to individual salespeople. Data can generate prompts about when they need to reach out to someone and help them track their previous outreach efforts.
A platform is a great tool for managers to stay apprised of what team members are working on. You can generate reports about individual performance that will be helpful for setting and evaluating quotas.
Meet With People One-on-One
Even when you’re supervising salespeople who have a tenure with your business that’s comparable to your own, you can’t simply assume that they’ll be self-sufficient in all of their activities. While you don’t want to micromanage, you need to stay actively engaged in supporting your team members.
Meetings are the best ways to offer meaningful support and supervision. When people are rockstars and don’t have much use for one-on-one coaching, just taking the opportunity to commend great work is a great use of meeting time.
Offer Constructive Feedback
When people aren’t delivering rockstar caliber performances with consistency in their saleswork, you should respond with a remedial consultation instead of a confrontation. There’s bound to be some negative energy steering the course of the conversation when you’ve got to address problems. Nevertheless, you can keep the dialog moving in a positive direction by staying solution-oriented. Cite examples of things that have previously worked well for people and suggest ways that they can replicate those past successes.
Offer Incentives That People Care About
Stepping up sales incentives is a great motivational vehicle. When you’re able to boost incentive structures or create new tiers for incentives after salespeople hit certain thresholds, you’re almost certain to see a sizable increase in sales volume.
Ask Your Senior Staff To Be Mentors
Mentorship can make a huge difference in individuals’ job performance. People who are new to sales or making an entry into a specialized type of sales that they aren’t familiar with are likely to have some trepidation. Mentorship creates a relationship where people can learn directly from one another about what works and what doesn’t. When individuals hear from their colleagues about how they made their journey from being the new guy to being an expert sales rep, they’ll feel more confident about their ability to make that same journey.
Having a mentor gives employees someone besides a supervisor to get help from. It’s understandable that people may feel a little reluctant about reaching out to you because they don’t want their boss to think that they’re inept or they don’t know everything that they should. A mentor, on the other hand, is more of a supportive figure while also being an authoritative source of information and guidance.
Give People Time Off
Paid time away from work is essential in every profession. In sales roles where performance bears heavily on compensation, however, workers often have to try to make due without the time off that they need to sustain a reasonable work-life balance. Make paid-time off a staple in your employee benefit offerings. When you aren’t able to compensate people financially as well as you’d like to be able to, compensating them for time off may help to bridge some of the gap for them.
Ultimately, taking active steps to support your team has the potential to yield substantial results. Individual job satisfaction and sales revenue can improve in tandem.
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