How to Improve Your Sales Team’s Performance

As a business owner or a manager, one of the most important things on your agenda is to sell more. This is done by uncovering the how and why of sales behavior and motivating your team to perform better and deliver results faster. While some might think improvement comes from inspiration, sales and service improvement is actually the outcome of systematic, planned actions over time at all levels. Here are a few tips to help you improve your sales team's performance.

Create Specific Goals

The only way you can improve your sales is if you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve so you can measure against it. Write down all your goals related to a sales, such as:

• Activity goals like calls per day, proposals per month, referrals per call, etc.
• Result goals like sales per month, profit per sale and sales per quarter.

Now, track these metrics closely to measure your progress. Readjust your goals based on historical data so that they are more reasonable. But, always have specific goals in mind to sharpen your focus and energize your action.

Sell to Customer Needs

Your prospects will buy if you give them something they really need.  You can emphasize the features of your product and sell the benefits, but, at the end of the day, you need figure out their problem and identify how your service can fix that particular problem. Train your sales reps to pick up on context clues so that they can focus on fixing the problem the customer has instead of selling features.

Communicate Effectively

In order to link your sales rep's goals to your overall goals, you need to communicate with them regularly and speak to them in a way that is motivational. People respond well when they can relate well to what you are saying, and this holds true for prospects you're selling to and your sales team. You should be tactful and choose between direct questioning or emotional questioning, depending on the situation and what you are assessing. You need to motivate and encourage your team, not interrogate them.

Support Systems

The other facet of communication is support. Through regular communication, you should pick up on where your reps are faltering and where you need to help them. Activity scorecards, pipeline forecasting and lead generation statistics or other business intelligence analytics can give you the tools to identify roadblocks and implement change. Continuous evaluation can help modify and enhance processes. Salesvue, as a whole, can help you improve your sales team's performance as a native application for Salesforce. Basically, when it is integrated with Salesforce, it uses the data in the sales CRM software to provide managers with real-time data on conversion patterns, how many calls/contacts it takes to get someone on the phone, how many conversations it takes to get an appointment, how well each individual sales rep is performing, how well the team as a whole is performing and much more. We help you create realistic goals by providing sales business intelligence insight so you and your sales organization can perform better. For more information on improving sales performance, download our latest white paper, "The 4 C's of Sales" by filling out the form below: