I understand the pain you feel if you’re a sales manager or business owner responsible for motivating your sales team to reach their sales goals. If you are like most of the owners and sales managers I work with, you know that you’re being pulled in many directions. It’s hard work. You have meetings, reports, and countless meetings. On top of that, you have many personalities on your team. Each one has different skills, motivation, and so forth.
It can feel overwhelming.
You probably haven’t had any sales management training, reinforcement or training. Your actual sales training for your team is probably not very well developed. I can see you nodding your head and saying, “Yeah! You got that right.” What now?
Here’s the deal. If you focus on the three essential elements of sales management, it is easy and straightforward. These three key elements will make your job so much easier and will help you and your team to close more deals and increase their sales.
Here are their details:
1) Identify your best practices in sales.
Your sales team should be given clear and easy-to-follow best practices in regards to selling techniques and skills. Make sure you give them specific scripts and rebuttals, qualifying questions and closing tools.
So, find out what works and what is not in your selling cycle, and then create a solid selling strategy. Then, make it company policy to use this system to manage every step of the selling process, from calling the prospect to qualify, leaving voice messages, emails, and getting back to them to close the sale.
This selling system must be easy to follow and understand. This will allow you to:
2) Monitor and implement your best practice system.
Imagine a great football team. What does a great football team do? They create the best game plan, or system. Then they teach it to their team and practice every play, formation and technique. They practice it over and over again and watch video of every practice and game to ensure their players are using the correct technique and following the plan.
This is what you should do with your sales team. After you have taught your sales team the best practices, you need to teach them and encourage them to follow it. This is done by watching your sales reps on the phone with prospects and customers. Record their calls, then review them with them to ensure they are following the best practices. You can encourage your team to adopt the best practices you have seen work. They will be more productive and increase their sales.
3) If your sales practices are not being followed, discipline your team members.
Let me first talk about discipline. Discipline is a Greek word that literally means “to teach,” and not “to make others feel bad or scold them.” A teacher, coach, or sales manager’s proper role is to identify when a student, sales rep, or other person is not following the proven methods to success and to then help them or “teach them” how to do it better. This is where your management skills (and your time) are most valuable.
This can be done in your one-on-one’s with a rep or in sales meetings. You can also play recordings of reps doing it correctly in meetings. It’s your job, as a manager, to provide the tools for your team to succeed and to teach them how to use them.
Implementing all three keys will result in the fastest and most efficient return on your investment and time. You will waste your time wondering about what is wrong and frustration will build with your team, your company, and with yourself.
Take a look at the current environment in which you are selling and identify which of these keys is missing. You’ll know what to do once you have found it!
