Business without sales professionals is just like a cake without sugar. Indeed, having experts in the sales team will lead you toward 100% success. But in my experience, I have noticed that around 65% of the salespeople are unable to reach their sales quotas. Well! The performance might be affected due to peer pressure, lack of skills, not getting proper guidance, and many more. This list goes on and on. 

Indeed, managing a sales team along with other tasks is not easy. No matter whether it's about managing an outside, or an inside sales team, sales managers need to work on their skills so that they can reach the goals without actually affecting the company's profitability. 

In this blog, I will be sharing some proven sales team management strategies that will surely increase rep satisfaction, boost performance and grow the company's revenue. Now, without any further discussion, let's dive in! 

7 Proven Sales team management strategies 

Define Goals

The sales team needs to be passionate enough to stretch their limits and ensure the best output. To make that happen, the sales goals need to be set accordingly. 

While setting these goals, you need them to be realistic and achievable so that the reps don't get discouraged for missing the targets. To maintain a perfect balance, you can go with some SMART goals, which are (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely).

If you define your goals by keeping these five factors in mind, then you can easily manage your entire sales team besides reaching your targets. 

Roles & Responsibilities

If your sales targets are not clear and the team members don't know what and how they have to achieve the targets, then they probably will land on nothing. But if the sales team is familiar with their responsibilities and knows their tasks clearly, then they can definitely reach their targets. 

Thus, make sure that the team must know their respective roles and responsibilities clearly so that they can consistently work on achieving their targets without any confusion. 

Also, while assigning them their responsibilities, you as a manager need to ensure that it matches up with the skill sets that they possess. 

Frame a scalable sales process

One of the other strategies that will help you manage your sales team more effectively is by framing a scalable sales process.  

As defined in my previous article on the sales process, it is clearly defined that there's always a process associated with ensuring scalability in sales. 

Implementing a systematic approach to enable the team to work efficiently and deliver results requires a clearly defined sales process. For this, you can draft a process depending on the product/service that your organization is offering.

Make sure the process is customer-centric and highly measurable. By keeping this in mind, your entire team can easily sell at a high level without actually getting affected. 

Setting up & Maintaining CRM

Getting leads isn't a challenge; the challenge begins when you don't have a proper CRM to store your leads where the sales reps can nurture them and can keep track of their status of the leads.

A CRM just like HubSpot can help you in capturing leads, help sales reps to converse with prospects, maintain deals & pipelines, and at the end present a meaningful reporting dashboard to see what worked and what went wrong while closing a deal.

Therefore, to align your sales team and hit the sales targets, you need to align your entire team with a CRM tool because it is seen that with a simple CRM tool, you can easily succeed in your tasks. 

Enabling Cross-Training & Cross-Selling

Training and transferring knowledge is another major component that will allow you to manage a sales team and build good revenue. 

Indeed, sales reps need to be trained and taught to cross-sell the services or the product. Cross-selling is the art to convince the prospect to go for other services as well while making decisions for one product or service.

This strategy will help the team to achieve their targets with good metrics if they enable themselves with the technique. Being a sales manager, your task is not all about assigning tasks; you are also responsible for mentoring others. So, if you are not availing the advantage of cross-training and cross-selling, then you need to surely work on it. 

Set up communication channels

The sales team dealing with services might need consistent help from the service team at the backend to ensure that whatever they are onboarding is something that the team is confident to deliver and they are not over-committing to the customer.

Setting up communication channels across teams would enable the sales team to close even faster, and the room for error or misunderstandings would be reduced to an extent. So, if your sales team members communicate on different channels, you need to sort these things out and ensure that they get in touch with each other on the right platform. Additionally, if your company has a local number, include it in your contact information. This will give your customers the impression that you're a local business, even if you're not. You can get yours with OpenPhone.

Read more- Proven tips on how to communicate with a client effectively

Look at the Territories Strategically

Last but not least tip that will help you in aligning your sales team is strategically assigning territories. Whenever you assign a task, you need to ensure that the sales rep's territories are not overlapping with each other. 

If each rep has enough accounts to work on and an understanding of the highest-value areas, you will surely see a boost in the results. So, if you are not aligned on this perspective, then make sure you keep this point at the top of your to-do list. 

The Final Say 

Well! There are many more tips that can be brought into the picture, but these are the topmost common strategies to help the sales team. By simply taking the above steps, your struggle towards managing the sales team will get diminished. 

So, what are you looking for? Start investing time in managing your sales team as it will surely make sense in hitting your business growth. 

Still, if you have queries related to sales strategy or want to get in touch without the sales team, feel free to contact us. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Leading a sales team entails setting clear goals, motivating through incentives, optimizing processes, monitoring performance, providing coaching, fostering collaboration, adapting to change, emphasizing customer-centricity, resolving conflicts, and maintaining a positive culture. Effective leadership, open communication, and aligning goals are key to success.

Sales responsibilities include prospecting and lead generation to find potential customers, building and nurturing relationships with clients to gain their trust and loyalty, and closing deals by persuading leads to make a purchase or commit to a contract. These tasks are essential in driving sales success.

Managing a sales team daily entails setting clear goals, monitoring performance metrics, providing individual support and coaching, assigning leads effectively, maintaining client relationships, motivating the team, and adapting to market changes. It also involves fostering collaboration, documenting activities, and celebrating achievements. This holistic approach ensures a motivated, productive team focused on achieving sales targets.

A strong sales strategy is a clear plan outlining how a company will achieve revenue goals. It involves defining the target audience, creating a compelling value proposition, selecting effective sales channels, setting competitive prices, establishing a defined sales process, generating leads, managing customer relationships, training the sales team, using metrics, adapting to market changes, staying customer-focused, and promoting continuous improvement. It must be flexible, customer-centric, and aligned with broader business objectives.

                                                                                                                         Editor–  Divya Verma