10 ways to drive great sales performance

How do you drive continuous sales performance?

I’ve been asked this question in a number of interviews and my answer is based on watching and learning both successful and struggling sales teams over the years. I’m positive that there are more nuggets of gold out there, but these would be my top ten ways to drive great sales, or my top ten reason why your team may not be performing at the level you’d like them to.

So here are my recommendations:

1) Clean up your CRM and get your team to use it as a time management tool. For a start, I have yet to meet someone who is a magic memory machine, so they should have notes somewhere. And if you have a manager who’s holding all that client information in their head or notebook, they can very easily walk out the door with it when they decide to go. It’s an enormous business continuity risk when customer facing teams are not held accountable for maintaining clean and plentiful account and contact notes. It also happens to be the best way for your teams to manage their time efficiently, and be ready for the next-step of the conversation with their client at the appropriate interval. If you happen to have a sales person who “doesn’t believe in using the CRM”, refer to point number 10.

2) I realise the placement of this may seem a bit contrary to point number 1, but focus on more than just your activity reports. Yes, use the reports to confirm your understanding of volume, conversion, and the use of the tool. But on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis there are far more supportive-coaching approaches to discussing activity with your teams. At the end of the day, they could be nailing 20 appointments per week, but if their conversion is terrible you’ll need to dive deeper at some point. I used to have a 5 minute daily huddle with one of my teams where we would hit the high points and any needs they might have for the day. It was highly effective because we were all a bit competitive by nature. If one person had a fully booked day of calls there would be high-fives and congrats and a bit of a fire lit under the other colleagues. Mix it up and ask more questions about what’s to be accomplished during the calls instead of focusing just on the numbers.

3) Celebrate every little milestone with your team. Especially if you’re working with a very pro-active or new team, remember that getting a pipeline going is long and sometimes tedious work. Celebrate a fully clean record of accounts. Celebrate identifying a new prospect. Celebrate full qualification of a client even if that client turned out to NOT be a good fit for your business. They know you, you know them, and you can put that one down for 4-6 months. Of courses when there is conversion ring all the bells, throw high-five’s around and break out the bubbles. But most importantly, celebrate connection- it’s the first step towards conversion and if you want your team to spend time on it they will need to feel some appreciation for the effort.

4) Get your team to pick up the phone and call someone. Social selling is great, having a presence on social media, sharing content and posting, liking and commenting…. all good activities. But at some point you are going to need to ask for an appointment a demo or a commitment. Pick up the phone and get to know them.

5) Create clear territories and make sure there is balanced opportunity for success amongst your team. I used to run an annual planning day where we would evaluate each of the geographic and vertical markets. We would establish weighting criteria across size of organisation, industry (and their likelihood to buy from us), growth in the last year, conversion ratio for the account and the industry or territory etc. Then we would level-set the territories for the year ahead. We were all held accountable for the same activity levels so there was a lot of trust going into the process, but this was a great way to put a halt to any of those dangerous tit-for-tat sales squabbles that can sometimes breakout. Creating a feeling of equity and equality in a team is important.

6) Make sure your team understands how the business works, how the business makes money, and how they feed into the greater goal of the team and organisation. If you want your team to book profitable, well-suited business partnerships, you’re going to need to provide transparency as to how the business works and what levers they can pull to negotiate on your behalf. In some organisations high-volume/low profit is a solid strategy for winning more business. In some companies it just means your service team is running off their feet or scrimping on the service. Make sure your teams understand how it works all the way through to the bottom line- or at the very least to the break-even point

7) Create pricing that is easy to understand. If you can’t explain it to your sales person clearly on their first day on the job how is your client EVER going to see the value in it.

8) Know your unique (and I mean truly unique) value proposition and be able to identify your optimal client profile by psychographic or demographic criteria. Your customers must be able to see exactly what’s in it for them, and why your organisation is one of the only places they can get it. And your sales people need to know what kind of client they are out there hunting for.

9) Always be curious, always be growing. Test new markets, test new ideas, test new ways to yield your business. Workshop with your performing team members to come up with ideas they believe will delight their clients, show them how to build a profitable test environment and give it a red hot go. If you’re standing still you are really just moving backwards.

10) Thank your lone-wolf for their service and send them in the direction of their next adventure. Sales teams thrive on collaboration, knowledge-sharing, healthy competition, celebration and team work. My most productive teams were catalysts for each other, pinging ideas, and creative approaches, sharing sample communications, client or competitor intelligence, creating events or content that would be of interest to their market, and most importantly they were supportive in providing introductions and contacts when they had them. Let’s get rid of that stodgy, old, selfish, dominator model and exchange it for a work environment that feels equitable, creative, and productive.

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