A sales team’s involvement in your company’s success is critical, and managing a sales team is no easy task. It is your responsibility to ensure that the correct people join the bus, coach them, and maintain team spirit in addition to quotas and target metrics.

You have the power to either build or ruin your sales organisation as a team leader. It is a demanding position, but if you follow the best practices of team management, you can ensure that you and your team will succeed.

Tips on how to manage a sales team

Having a well-trained sales crew can help you grow your firm to a new level of success. Building a team Building a sales “dream team” begins with the hiring process and continues throughout the employee lifecycle. Most business owners have to deal with challenges like sales coaching, time management, and motivation.

Here are some useful tips for creating a successful and cohesive sales team:

1. Be Results Driven

Hire those who have a strong desire to succeed. Create a sales-oriented workplace that is both transparent and metric-driven. In the end, when you bring together people who are fiercely competitive in a transparent environment, the entire organisation rises and advances. Highlight the results of their efforts to avoid confusion between activity and productivity.

2. Identify your need to build a team

Sales managers need first to build a sales team before they can manage it. Determine the type of people you’ll be working with before you begin to establish a sales team. 

• Builders: People who have a strong entrepreneurial spirit. For field sales, they’re particularly effective.
• Growers: Companies with a well-established procedure in place, on the other hand, benefit from the expertise of growers.

Only a small percentage of salespeople can excel at both. How do you choose the greatest sales representatives for your company? Here are some basic but effective sales team management tips:

• Make sure you hire people that like the challenge of establishing procedures and pipelines from the ground up if you’re a startup or a small business.
• Hire growers as your account executives if you have a well-oiled system at your disposal.

3. Manage your expectations

Managers are always looking to do their best for their employees. So, it is crucial to carefully think if you want a salesperson who routinely falls short of the target or one who consistently surpasses the target. Make it clear what you mean when you describe someone as over or underachieving.

4. Invest in coaching

You can’t expect to have a successful sales force if you don’t make learning a part of your company culture. Maintaining the capabilities of your staff by investing in their professional development is beneficial to your company’s growth. Develop their product knowledge, prospecting, professional communication, and decision-making capabilities through frequent training.

5. Specialise early

Avoid treating all your salespeople alike. For example, are they better at building relationships with small firms or big corporations? Do they have a greater grasp of particular industries than others? Your prospects should be segmented, and your sales team must be segmented as well, especially as your company expands.

6. Set high but realistic goals

Set the sales target high enough to be challenging but not unachievable. To put things in perspective, achieving 60% of your stretch sales objectives is still better than hitting 100% of your mid-range sales goals. Focusing on SMART goals is another of the greatest sales team management tips you can focus on in the current market. SMART denotes:

• S – Specific
• M – Measurable
• A – Achievable
• R – Realistic
• T – Timely

Make your sales staff feel like they’re all on the same page and working together to achieve a common goal.

7. Volume vs Value

Low-volume, but high-value operations, such as cultivating connections and getting referrals and collaborations, call for your most valuable (and most expensive) team members to devote the majority of their time. Your lower-value employees should concentrate on activities that generate more volume, such as converting prospects into leads. Leads are no exception to this rule. The best strategy is to focus on fewer but better opportunities.

8. Distribute accounts equitably

It’s easy to reward your top-performing sales staff with lucrative promotions, but striking a fair balance is also critical. Spend time and money on developing new sales talent and providing them with the duties and opportunities they need to succeed in the field.

9. Promote Transparency

Transparency is a core value for team management, especially for teams in high-performing sales companies. Transparency means that everybody in the team knows how well you’re doing and what has to be fixed in business. Each member of a successful team knows exactly what they’re working towards and how they’re progressing. To gauge a salesperson’s success, consider the following indicators:

• The amount of time they have spent on cold calls
• Total number of phone calls
• Their sales pipeline’s shape

Keep track of all the deals you’ve closed and their current worth on a dashboard. Seeing everyone’s sales performance inspires your team to work better and promotes openness. Also, a team can prosper if it has defined goals, KPIs, and reasonable expectations.

10. Lead by example

As a leader, you have the power to inspire and motivate your team members, and it all begins with you. When communication, cooperation, and reliability are all engaged in the workflow, success is almost entirely driven by the team. Ensuring that your employees are in a good and instructional environment will help them respect and adhere to the same business values as you.

11. One size doesn’t fit all

Many various personalities and temperaments make up a sales team. It is your responsibility as the sales manager to ensure that your team is equipped to succeed. As a manager, you want to keep your employees from being distracted by internal politics or questionable sales practices so that they can concentrate on their work. Find out what drives each employee and use that information to help them become a more effective member of your sales team.

Conclusion

As a business owner or manager, your primary responsibilities should be to hire the best employees, select the best sales platform, monitor key performance indicators, and foster a positive company culture. While managing your sales team isn’t easy, you can get your team to reach new heights with these proven strategies as effective sales team management tips.