How to Support Your Sales Team to Increase Your Revenues

A company’s sales team is one of the main pillars of a business. This team is responsible for communicating with potential clients and getting them engaged in your company’s products or services. As a business owner, you need to invest in putting together a team of experienced sales representatives because they’re the ones that generate profit for your company. It all starts by choosing the best people for the job. You want to maintain your team as much as possible, and this part can be a lot harder than the hiring part.

To figure out how to increase your company’s revenues, the first thing you need to look at is data from your sales department. There are plenty of tactics and strategies that you can implement to increase the sales productivity in your company. Most people working in sales departments spend only a third of their time performing tasks related to sales. You need to figure out what delays their course of work and how to make things easier for them. Here are a few points to put into consideration as a sales manager to help your team increase your company’s revenues.

Get Your Team Excited

Let’s say you’ve already chosen your team carefully and hired the best employees for the job. Now comes the exciting part. As a leader, you need to motivate your team members. Make sure to meet up with all your sales representatives and discuss your goals, mission, and vision of your company. When people feel included in your dream, they get excited to contribute to making it come true. Take the time to talk with them about their personal goals and what they aspire to be in the next 5 or 10 years. Help them see that they can achieve all those goals and more while working with you.

A good manager anticipates their team’s needs and knows when they’re frustrated or drifting apart from their work. Encourage team-building activities to promote a sense of unity in your team. Make them feel welcome to come to you at any time with issues, and help them fix any problems that come their way. Give them a well-formed plan for the next month or three months, and follow up on them regularly. Employees usually work better when they are supervised.

Implement Sales Tools

Most employees find themselves working for at least 2 or 3 hours a day doing mundane manual tasks. These tasks take a lot of time and effort that can be better used to perform other valuable job tasks. Automation is becoming more and more popular every day as various tasks can be performed more quickly and accurately by a computer. One of the most popular tools used in sales departments is customer relationship management or CRM system. This tool helps companies with their sales and marketing strategies by focusing on their relationships with clients, suppliers, and any other entities that directly affect the company’s revenue.

CRM tools can store large amounts of customer information, find opportunities for sales with other potential clients, and launch marketing campaigns. These aspects are essential when developing high performing teams, and automating them makes the process a lot easier for salespeople and marketers. Other tools can help sales teams to find business-to-business prospects by allowing them to process information by regularly updating clients’ data and finding out new market opportunities. Your sales team will also need an internal communications channel where they can talk to their colleagues if they’re stuck with a certain assignment.

Sales employees usually spend a lot of time driving around to meet potential clients, so it helps to use navigational route planners that allow them to share their locations and sales activities with their colleagues and supervisors. This tool helps managers keep a record of their team’s performance, which leads us to the next point.

Tracking Your Team’s Performance

Managers need to be on top of any issues that may face their team and find ways to optimize their work. They must be able to measure the performance of each sales employee. As a sales manager, you have to be consistent in tracking your team’s metrics. Certain resources such as performance improvement plan templates can be a quick and easy way to get started with this. You need to make sure that they’re spending every minute of their working day performing sales activities.

The first measurement for sales productivity is the conversion rate, which tells you the percentage of customers buying your products or subscribing to your services. It’s calculated by dividing the number of sales by the number of leads that an employee goes through in a certain period. This number is a great way to find out how well each member is performing.

The second metric is a calculation of average sales made by an employee in an hour. You only include the time spent doing sales activities and not other unrelated tasks. Find out the average sales of your whole team and if someone is below average, talk to them and find out what’s causing the problem.

You also need to measure the mean percentage error that informs you whether your sales representatives are meeting or behind on their targets. It’s calculated by excluding your predicted number of sales from the actual number and dividing the product by the actual number of sales made by the employee.

Create a Regular Schedule

People work better when they have a goal to achieve. Working in sales means you need to meet specific targets. You need to set a schedule for your field sales employees and another one for your internal sales employees. Sales representatives who work in the field spend a lot of commute time plus extra time spent while waiting for meetings and preparing other administrative assignments. As a manager, you have to help your team organize their time by implementing a daily routine that they can easily follow to make full use of their time.

This schedule can only work if it’s optimized for each employee. A good team leader knows which employee tends to lose their focus at a certain time of day and when it’s time for a pep talk. Getting to know each individual will help you anticipate their needs, which will help increase your team’s productivity. It’s best to form a plan for the whole week so that you know beforehand how each day goes.

Set SMART goals

The SMART goal model is used to help people set an achievable purpose. For the best results, your goal has to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Most sales representatives tend to miss their goals because they’re unrealistic in the set time frame. Employees need to understand that they can’t achieve more goals by having too many objectives. It’s better to focus on a project or two and ensure that they give them their full attention.

The first aspect of your goal is that it should be a specific measurement within a certain time. For example, you need to decrease the expenses of prospective client’s acquisition by 40% by the end of 2022. The measurable aspect of your goal would be something like increasing the number of clients to be 50 by next month. Ask yourself whether this target is achievable, which is the next point in your goal. Depending on your type of business and number of employees, you can find out if you can reach that goal within a month. If it’s not achievable, you can try to extend the time frame. Once you determine the appropriate time to reach that goal, that’s when you’ve established a proper SMART goal.

Automation

Apart from the previously mentioned sales CRM tools, there are a lot of administrative tasks that should be automated for better performance. Managers should invest in a sales platform that’s used for employee engagement. This platform will help free up a lot of your employees’ time to do other more important tasks, thus increasing their sales productivity. Various tasks can be automated by a software program that can track the schedule of field employees and record their activities in the CRM tools. These tasks include data entry, client visits, emails, and daily schedules.

Automation can also help you find potential clients based on previous data and new unexplored markets. You can pull up a list of prospects in a certain area by ranking companies according to their size, number of employees, type of business, and other factors. Once you’ve determined companies’ locations, try to strategically plan which field employees should work on each area to ensure that each sales representative can cover the extra clients. Make sure to assign the most important customers to your best performers and work your way down from that point.

Lastly, try to help out as much as you can by being available for your team. Purchase new tools that can automate their daily tasks and supervise their performance. Your energetic attitude plays a major role in getting your team excited to increase their productivity by encouraging healthy competition every once in a while. Remember that it’s your job as a sales manager to do everything you can to make their job easier.