One thing every sales manager wants is to have an awesome sales team who performs to their best everyday. However, we all know that’s not always the case. How can you make that possible?
Whether you work for a small startup or a large company, these 5 tips to help your sales team grow will work for you. And whether you’re the boss, middle management or a sales manager, you can start applying them right away! Let´s get started …
How to grow a sales team on 5 easy steps
1. Coach rather than give orders
The number one mistake most managers make is giving orders and bossing their employees around, whether it’s unintended or a chosen type of management style. Although this has been proven to clearly be an outdated technique, it is still very common in many companies and industries. However, when it comes to sales teams it’s a truly terrible way to help employees grow!
Why? You can’t tell someone to make a sale, you have to teach them and show them how. Without having the right techniques and skills, a new salesperson won´t know the first thing about closing contracts. The best way to help your sales team grow is by coaching them, guiding them throughout the process until they are top sales people.
In case you cannot do it yourself, hire a professional with a solid coaching contract template to do it.
There are a myriad of ways to do this – not only just through your own management style, but by sending employees to sales seminars, provide internal training, creating a program of internal mentoring … try out a few different approaches and see what works best.
2. Help middle performers become top performers
Your top performers already know how to get the job done, so while you may be attempted to focus your efforts on them, chances are they have discovered what works for them and will continue to improve and improve as they implemented these lessons learned.
The part of your team that could really use your help is the middle performers. Why is that? They’re the core of your team, so if you look at it just from a practical standpoint; if the majority of your team improves, it will yield much greater results for the company.
Not convinced? See what Vadim Zorin has to say about this approach: “A five percent gain in the middle 60 percent of your sales performers can deliver over 91 percent greater sales than a five percent shift in your top 20 percent”.
3. Use the top performers to help the bottom ones
Since you won’t have time to help everyone (and while we’re not saying you shouldn’t pay attention to the lowest performers), you do have limited time and won’t be able to focus on everyone, at all times. Use your team and put them to work – internally! Ask the top performers to guide and coach the lower performers, and see how everyone benefits. The best performers will feel positive about their work and valued employees – and those benefitting will get a hands on coach in their own team, and could even build up mentor relationships. It’s a win-win all around!
4. Use the right tools
Your sales team will only be able to perform as well as the tools and resources they have. While some of that is the knowledge and mentoring you will be giving, they will also need the right tools to get their job done faster. Make sure they have the technological tools that will help them to save time and work better. We can’t help but recommend FindThatLead – a plugin that finds almost anyone´s email address in mere seconds. A tool that stops salespeople from wasting countless hours searching on the internet for email addresses!
5. Listen
Make yourself available to your entire team, at all times. Just because we recommend focusing on the middle, that doesn’t´t mean you should ignore your top or bottom performers. If members of the team don’t feel valued or appreciated, that´s one sure way to see performance drop! Encourage your sales team members to come to you with any problems, to ask question or for advice. An open door is the best policy to maintaining communication and avoiding any surprises.
What do you think? If you try some of these methods, let us know how it worked for you!
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