Introduction To Sales Team Goals
The duty of a sales manager is a challenging one. They have to face many challenges throughout their careers, no matter which organization they are a part of. One of their main challenges is to keep their sales team goals always motivated to produce satisfactory results.
Some people believe that the best ways to keep their sales personnel motivated are by spending a lot on them or keeping them engaged in some training. However, the better tracks are to reduce their administrative burdens and increase their on-field or phone time.
20 Best Ways to Improve your sales team goals & productivity
Considering these facts, we have produced a few of the best ideas to make a B2B salesperson more productive. These are as follows:
1. Update sales team goals with the latest technology
This doesn’t mean that your sales personnel should give a trendy and costly new gadget but should be efficient with the latest tools to perform their tasks more easily and efficiently. If they are busy solving their tech issues with the support team, they’ll lose precious time with the prospects or customers. So this shouldn’t happen under any circumstance.
Having said this, it is also your duty as a sales manager to ensure that sales personnel have at least a few latest devices, such as a 4G iPad and an Android mobile, at all times. It would always keep them connected to the internal systems and the Internet, which is crucial for a business organization. Stay aware and open to all technological advancements, and try to equip your sales team goals with some of them.
2. Stop asking for TPS Reports!
An efficient sales manager focuses more on actual sales and increasing sales targets than the fulfillment of paperwork, and TPS reports, for that matter. Thus, be flexible when asking your sales team for weekly or monthly reports of sales figures rather than letting them hit the market with freedom and focus on closing the sale prospect. You can hire an administrative assistant to look after the official formalities on your behalf.
3. Don’t be an obstacle!
This tip is very similar to the above two tips since it emphasizes that the sales manager’s responsibility is to remove every obstacle in the way of his sales personnel, be it anything. The sales team should focus on their appointments, prospect visits, and customer interactions without any hindrance from other obstacles. So the sales manager should take care of this situation himself.
4. Remote Meetings
You need to change if you are one of those managers who like to meet each sales team member individually and assign them new revenue and sales targets. It’s a good practice to let the sales team goals operate independently and, if necessary, take the sales meetings via telephone or Skype. In some companies, this is considered dangerous, but if you can communicate to the team members that the prime focus is to achieve targets, then it’s not a bad thing!
5. Train them!
Yes, sometimes training is good for the sales team’s goals, and you as a sales manager, must arrange for their proper training from time to time. Train them to increase their productivity and develop their selling skills as well. However, most importantly, you should train them to deal with the latest technology trends and how to utilize them to their advantage best.
6. Employ Appointment Setters
Your trained and professional sales team goals spend so much time dialing phone numbers and trying to set an appointment with prospects. Their aggregate productivity is severely affected by such a scenario, and it results in lowered sales targets. Instead, what you can do is to try and hire “appointment setters” to work for you who would set appointments with clients on your behalf. It would lead your salespeople to focus more on face to face communication with prospects and clients and ultimately closing the deals. Additionally, leveraging appointment setting software can streamline the process, ensuring more efficient scheduling and better use of your team’s time.
7. Introspect whenever time
Every sales manager has some great salesmen, some average salesmen, and a few below average salespeople working for him. However, your duty as a sales manager is to look after your team. You must introspect from time to time as to what makes your top sellers perform and what hinders the below-average staff. Afterward, tell those underachievers what they lack and how to reach the mark. Remember, better-performing salespeople, mean more sales and increased revenue.
8. Be in their shoes!
This means you should know and feel their grievances and what objections they face from the prospects. If you can’t get enough info directly from the sales team goals, then it’s not a bad idea to take some time to accompany them in a few major appointments to know how they’re doing it and how they can eradicate their problems future. Your skill and experience will greatly help them.
9. Initiate an Inbound Marketing Campaign
Keeping their sales personnel engaged and in the field all the time is the biggest challenge faced by sales managers these days. To overcome this obstacle, you can take the help of social media and the Internet to view and generate more and more leads for your sales team. Increased leads will make your salespeople in the field most of the time, which would mean more sales and revenue.
10. Motivate them as much as can
Motivation is the prime force behind every seller doing his duties. However, every salesperson is motivated differently. What motivates Seller A might not motivate Seller B and vice versa. As a sales manager, it is in your interest that you learn about the motivating factors of each of your sellers and thus feed them enough of that to keep them going.
Below are a few guidelines for today’s sales managers to employ and pass on their sales team activities. However, these are broad points and do not guarantee desired levels of success or achievement of sales figures. But, these can significantly assist in boosting the overall capacity of your sales team goals and ensure the long-term productivity of the organization.
Now, we will present a few more of the working tips for the sales managers of today that have universal applicability. These areas are mentioned:
11. Lot admin work
Most of us are in the habit of doing important tasks in linearity. For example, we make a phone call, leave a voicemail, record it in CRM, send a follow-up e-mail, etc. However, collecting all the admin work is best to keep oneself in the groove. For example, make all the calls at once, jotting down a few important notes. Next, do all the CRM work and, finally, do all the follow-up work simultaneously. Finishing similar tasks in lots is a more productive way of doing things linearly.
12. Automate parallel tasks
As a sales manager, you should value your time and efforts and try to automate parallel or redundant tasks to make those happen faster. For example, you can blind-copy your official e-mail id with any outbound e-mails to customers or prospects. The benefit of recording prospect’s actions in your email ID is that any action initiated by the prospect will get automatically documented. Thus you save a lot of manual effort and time.
13. Automate buying & trigger events alerts
As a sales manager, you can also automate the buying behavior and event triggers of prospects that take place instantly via social media platforms. For example, you can set up alerts on major channels like Instagram, LinkedIn, OFunnel, and Newsle, which will be delivered directly to your mailbox. Afterward, make it a point to regularly check up on the alerts, preferably first thing in the morning.
14. Build and follow a prospective research process
It is not a good idea to leave the important tasks of fixing and attending to a prospect’s appointment with their own devices. Rather, create a standardized processor system to increase the stability and success of these tasks while reducing the time they take. For example, design a 2-minute process for all salespeople to follow before they commit to any prospect’s call. It could be like checking it on Google or browsing their LinkedIn profiles. Such a step could significantly reduce the non-selling time of salespeople and increase their efficiency.
15. Buy effective gadgets
I would surely not advise any of the sales (or would be) managers to be penny wise and pound foolish at any stage of their careers. How would you feel if one or more of your sales personnel couldn’t attend an appointment within the stipulated time and the meeting was called off? It is not the fault of your salesman but the equipment he uses. Thus, I would buy decent standard gadgets and equipment for my salespeople.
16. Reduce lay-off time
Many leading corporations around the world generally observe that their sales staff wastes precious time by slowly wandering off and leaving their seats. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen. You can certainly allow some time off for them periodically, but then they must adhere to those strictly. As a manager, you can also offer some rewards at the end of each month to those who have complied with them.
17. Make your leads better
In many organizations, some capable sales staff are utterly wasted because of false or unresponsive leads. As a sales manager, you must ensure that your sales team activities have sufficient leads available to them. However, better leads mean responsive leads who buy. There’s no point in having a significant number of leads, but most do not pick up your calls or want to avoid fixing an appointment.
18. Invest in your staff
This point has already been discussed in detail and emphasizes that happy sellers mean more sales, and disinterested ones are worthless to you. Thus, investing in your best-performing personnel is hugely important and keeps them motivated by any means possible.
19. Improve your content and make it available
Every sales personnel is given an information handout, broachers, and leaflets about the company and its products which they then study and show to their prospects. It is really necessary to manage and update the companies’ official content so that each piece of information about your organization provides to the clients or prospective ones. But if your content needs to be updated or more accurate, how do you expect your sales staff to speak confidently during an appointment with the prospect?
20. Structure meetings productively
Firstly, having frequent and repetitive meetings is good for the health of your organization. However, whenever you call a meeting, ensure that every seller attentively listens and participates as you would like. Convey and discuss the agenda with the sellers but don’t take too much time of theirs. And once the plan is finalized, try to free the sales personnel as quickly as possible to utilize their time on actual client meetings.
Conclusion
These were some tips and advice we could assemble about getting the best out of your sales team goals. However, be aware that they are not a guaranteed source of success and that the applicability of each or all of these is dependent on different company situations and circumstances. Would you like to add something to this list? What is the main cause of the loss of productivity of your sales team goals, or what led your team to be active and successful sellers? We would love to hear.
Recommended Articles
This has been a guide to keep the sales team goals motivated to produce satisfactory results all the time. These are the following external link related to the sales team goals.
