Sales Performance: Is Your Team Measuring Up?
An effective sales team is fundamental to success in business. Building one requires investment first to find and hire sales talent that is the best fit for the company’s market, products, and culture, and then to provide those individuals with the knowledge, collaborative capabilities and access to expertise and tools they need to excel. In this article we are going to review three key areas that affect performance:
Effective Sales Methodology and Process
Sales Talent Acquisition and Retention
Sales Tools & Adoption
Effective Sales Methodology and process
There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that a sales methodology can dramatically increase the sales effectiveness of your entire sales organization, significantly increasing your sales revenue. The bad news is that not all sales methodology solutions are implemented well. Although you may have a sales process defined the challenge how effective is it?
Today we need to consistently review what is working and what is not.
- The need for increased sales effectiveness
- Revenue Improvement
- Customer loyalty/satisfaction
- Improved margin/reduce discounting
- Improve team selling
- Optimize lead generation
- Reduce selling cycle
- Increased re-order/renewal rates.
The above are struggles faced consistently in the selling process. In order to support more efficiency in the most effective areas, companies need to center on management discipline, management by objectives along with refinement and evaluation of the right mix of incentives to improve sales performance. This means you clearly need to follow what we call the Five Step Review
- (Goals and Objectives) Clearly, define what you are trying to accomplish.
- (System and Process) What are your internal and external best practices in your sales system and process that will lead to sales success?
- (Measuring and Monitoring) How are you currently measuring those for success factors? When are they being measured?
- (Accountability) Who is accountable? This is huge when it comes done to what is working and what is not. Everyone is accountable for the outcome and evaluation needs to occur on weekly basis to stay on top on a process or a system that could be working or not!
- (Consequences) What are the consequences? Well, they could go either way depending on your ability to have the right disciplines in place to stay on top of what is happening in your sales pipeline and applying corrective action.
Sales Talent Acquisition and Retention
Business needs to embed more science into sales talent acquisition and retention practices to create a measurable impact on finding and keeping the right sales representatives. Establish a clear understanding of the competencies, capabilities, and behaviors that lead to high-performance sales representatives in their organization. Tailor recruiting and hiring practices to fulfill this benchmark. Build an ongoing competency development program to continuously improve and retain sales representatives. In our organization we specialize in just that checkout our website findsalestalentcanada.com to learn more about our system and process we guarantee our services.
Sales Tools and Adoption
Automate your sales force with technology that delivers distinctive value to sales representatives and ultimately customers. To get the most out of sales technologies, especially the newer capabilities available with mobile, it is important to first design and model the sales tools against successful mature processes. Instead of building the tools to serve the needs of sales managers, focus on delivering a distinctive, value-based experience to sales representatives. Commit to a process of continuous evolution and improvement in the tools deployed to sales. Embrace Technology it is the future to supporting and discovering your full sales potential.