Do you have a good sales team? If so, you may be content with the amount of leads you have coming in and your conversion rate. However, you may also be asking yourself if you could grow your customer base even faster. A good sales team is nice, but a great sales team can transform a business. If you’re looking to develop an elite sales team that has a crazy conversion rate and is the envy of your competitors, you need a plan. Very few companies stumble into the right combination of people, strategies, and timing.
If you’re ready to take your sales team to the next level, it’s time to put together a serious strategy. Here are some advanced tactics that can help you level up your sales team and turn it into the elite force you need to grow your business. As always, Scaling Sales is here to help you with our business coaching and mentoring. We can help you evaluate your sales processes and learn what needs to be changed in order to boost your sales.
Elite Sales Teams Don’t Exist in a Vacuum
The first tactic for building your elite sales team actually doesn’t involve your sales team. None of your teams or departments exists in a vacuum, so you need to take both a wide view of your business and focus on the sales team. Let’s start with the big picture. Does your company promote a healthy culture of communication, engagement, and encouragement? Are your employees happy? Do they enjoy what they do, and do they come together to solve problems? If you don’t have a healthy company culture, your employees may not be happy, and that does impact how well they do their jobs.
So before you begin making changes to your sales team, look at your company overall. Send out satisfaction surveys, gather employee opinions, and make any changes that you need to make. In addition to boosting your sales, you’ll find that adjusting your company culture can make every employee across the business more productive and engaged. Just be sure you’re actually addressing problems. Having lunch catered once a month or upgrading the break room won’t do anything if your employees are unhappy with other issues.
Know What Skills Your Team Needs
What skills do your current sales team members have, and what areas aren’t covered? When hiring new sales reps, you want to be certain you’re not duplicating skills that you don’t need to duplicate. In some cases, having multiple employees with the same specialization is good, but in other cases, you may not need people who have the same skills. Instead, you may want to specifically look for candidates who bring something new to the table.
You also want to look at traits. What traits do your top performers exhibit? Are they ambitious, self-starters, willing to collaborate, or always looking to learn more? Make a list of these traits and use it to help your hiring team find the right people. It’s not always easy to match up traits to candidates—it’s not like skills on a resume. However, good interviewers do have a knack for telling who has the traits you want and need on your team.
Elite Sales Teams Have the Right Tools for the Job
In addition to the right people, you also need to make certain your sales team has the right tools for the job. If they don’t have the right software, lead lists, training, and other tools, they’re not going to be as effective as they could be. This means more than just giving them a customer database or lead-tracking software. They need to have tools that are up to date. You will want to periodically review the software and other tools you’re using and update them as needed.
Training is also very important. Your sales team needs to be trained on new lead-generating methods and other processes. While some of the basics of sales haven’t changed much in years, other aspects have. For example, think about where the world was 20 years ago. In 2003, social media marketing was barely even a concept. Even email and text messaging weren’t used as much in lead generation and conversion as they are today. Sales teams who didn’t learn about these tools and learn how to incorporate them into their sales pipeline quickly fell behind.
Know When to Scale Your Team
It’s hard for your sales reps to be at the top of their game if your sales team is too small for your business. This leads to each employee dealing with more accounts and leads than they should, and that can quickly lead to people feeling overwhelmed or falling behind. Keep a close watch on your sales team and be sure to hire additional people when you’re growing.
Of course, you also don’t want to hire too many people. While it may not seem like it, this can actually affect productivity, too. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, employees may feel bored. They may not feel like their skills are being used or that they’re not challenged. Your best sales team members may decide to look for other opportunities that let them show off their skills rather than stay in a position that doesn’t give them a lot to do.
Set the Right Goals
What are your sales goals? These goals will drive your overall plans and push your sales team forward. You may have monthly or quarterly goals that help you measure your overall progress towards your yearly goal, which in turn can measure your progress towards your five- or ten-year plans. These goals can help you see when you need to grow your sales team as well as when something is going wrong. If you’re continually missing your goals, it could be because your team needs more training or doesn’t have the right tools.
Of course, if you don’t set the right type of goals, you may find that even the best team can’t achieve them. Goals that are unrealistic will be very difficult to meet. This can damage your team morale because your sales team will feel like they’re always failing. Goals that are too easily met can also lead to a lack of motivation because your team will know they don’t have to work that hard.
In addition to being realistic, sales goals need to be measurable. If you can’t measure a goal, you can’t know if you achieved it or not. The goal of “growing our customer base” isn’t specific or measurable. Adding a single new customer could be considered growth in this case. However, the goal of “increasing our customer base by 15% by the end of the year” is both specific and easily measured if you have the right data. Of course, make certain your team is acknowledged and rewarded when they reach these larger goals. No one will have much motivation to reach milestones if they’re not acknowledged when they do so.
Collect the Right Data
It’s much easier to measure goals when you have the right data. An elite sales team needs to have access to the right data in order to work effectively. Knowing what information to collect is vital. It starts with leads. Where are you getting information about leads from? If you’re collecting information via an online form, you want to be certain you’re asking the right questions. If you’re buying a list of customers, you want to ensure that the list is both accurate and has all the data your team will need to segment leads.
Once you’ve started the lead-generating process, there’s still more data to collect. What do your leads need? How many are ready to close deals right away, and how many will need some cultivation over a few months? This data will help your sales team categorize leads and give them the right attention to convert into customers. Finally, you’ll want to collect data from sales and from leads that dropped out of the sales funnel. Understanding why someone converted and why someone didn’t is important to understanding what your customers and leads want. This data could be used to revise your products or services.
Finally, all of this data can help you evaluate your goals and whether or not you met them. It’s important you know what data you need, though, so you’re not trying to collect everything. It is possible to have too much data. Worse, trying to collect huge amounts of data can mean that you miss gathering the information you truly need. Be certain there’s a reason you collect the data you do and that you are familiar with all the rules and regulations regarding data collection in your industry and your location.
Scaling Sales Can Help You Create the Elite Sales Team You Need
Whether it’s due to a lack of training, an unbalanced sales team, or issues with your processes, you can turn things around. Sometimes you just need an outsider’s point of view. Scaling Sales is here to provide that point of view. We will provide the coaching needed to help you identify issues in your processes, your team, and your company as a whole that need to be addressed in order to boost your sales. Reach out today to learn more about our process.
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