Projections show that the global sales platforms software market will reach a value of $193 billion by 2032. Improving the performance of your sales team is crucial when it comes to growing your business, and the use of sales software is one of many ways you can do that. There’s also a range of other things you can implement, and understanding what these are will help you decide what’s best to move your company forward.
For a rundown of 15 proven ways to improve the performance of your sales team, keep reading.
Table of Contents
1. Embrace Sales Tools
Over the years, digitization has taken over many industries. Some people have been resistant to it, but it has improved businesses in a range of ways. Computers and software have made things much more efficient in various industries, and the sales industry is no different.
Getting the right software for your sales team can help them become more organized, efficient, and productive. Many salespeople these days rely on multiple tools to help them generate sales by helping them with different tasks. Salesforce is one of the most widely used platforms in the world, and there are various apps it can integrate.
Fastcall is one such app that can help with calls, texts, and video calls. It uses Salesforce Lightning Design System, so onboarding is easy. And as it’s fully integrated into Salesforce, it remains secure while not needing any additional user login.
2. Track and Measure Sales Activities
If your business is experiencing sales inefficiency, you might not fully understand why without tracking certain metrics. By having an insight into the activities of different members of your sales team, and how well they’re performing, you can determine areas of weakness as well as areas of strength.
With such information, you can make decisions about what to change to improve sales. For this, you also need to make sure your employees are logging their activities properly, giving you accurate information to work with.
Some of the metrics that you should be keeping track of are:
- Contact rate
- Lead rate
- Close rate
- Average revenue per sale
- Rate of follow-up contact
Track these details and analyze them for each salesperson. When you find an area where someone is slacking, you can take action to make improvements. This will also help your workers get a better insight into their own performance, as they may not realize where they’re underperforming.
3. Establish a Schedule
Like tracking metrics, keeping a schedule will help with organization. It will ensure all of your workers know what they have to do, and when they have to do it. This schedule could be standard across the board or may vary for each salesperson, depending on the business.
If your workers will need personalized schedules, it may be best to get them to create these themselves. This way, they can build a schedule based on what they need to do, as well as how they work best.
A structured schedule will keep tasks on track, ensure meetings end on time, and help people meet their targets. As a general idea, you could get your team to prioritize important, long-term clients first, followed by new leads. Less important tasks should fall later on in case there are any issues.
4. Create Daily Goals
On top of a regular schedule, your workers can set other goals for individual days to help increase productivity. These goals can help provide some direction towards certain targets. If different metrics are tracked properly, these can help people determine how they can meet their goals.
For example, if an individual knows that they make one sale for every 50 sales calls, they will know how many calls they need to make to meet a specific target. If this person wants to hit 20 sales, they need to make around 50 calls a day. Things like this can allow your team to set realistic goals and work more efficiently to reach them.
5. Use Automation
Within any business, there will be daily tasks that are simple and repetitive but can take up a lot of time. If you’re able to automate some of these tasks, you can save a huge amount of time.
Something like entering details into a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can take up several hours each week. By automating this, your employees could use this time for more crucial tasks, leading to increased sales productivity. On top of being time-consuming, such tasks can be tedious, so if your workers no longer have to do them, it will increase their overall job satisfaction.
Some typical tasks that can be automated include:
- Data entry
- Texts and emails
- Logging visits
- Day planning
Another benefit of automation is accuracy. No matter how good an individual’s attention to detail is, human error can always cause mistakes, which automated systems will avoid.
6. Prospect Smarter
Whatever industry you’re in, you won’t be able to sell to everyone. Some prospects are more likely to buy from you than others, so identifying the best prospects will help increase sales. This is another area where automation and sales tools can come in handy.
Some tools let you filter prospects using various data points such as income, company size, revenue, and business type. With these tools, you can quickly generate a list of potential clients and your sales team can get to work.
There’s not much point in spending time trying to sell to prospects who have no interest in your goods or services. Targeting suitable clients is one of the best ways to improve efficiency.
7. Strategically Assign Sales Territories
By establishing territories and assigning them to different sales personnel, you can target specific clients more effectively. This is the beginning of the sales process, so it will get your team started in the right direction.
By giving each team member a set territory to work on, you can prevent any overlap and ensure everyone has a suitable number of leads to work on. You can also prioritize your biggest and most important accounts, giving them to your top performers.
You can choose to assign territories based on various factors. This can include things like location, business size, revenue, and industry type.
8. Visualize Customers on a Map
You can implement customer mapping into your CRM – such as Salesforce – allowing your reps to more easily distinguish between leads, opportunities, and existing customers. By presenting this in an easy-to-digest format, your team can take the best actions with ease.
If everyone has their set territory, they can pull up a visual map and select a lead to visit. They’ll then see all the information they need about that client. They can also use filters to narrow down leads if they’re after something specific.
9. Use Sequences to Improve Pipeline Activity
Turning leads into sales isn’t easy, and it’s here where a salesperson needs to persist. If someone gives up too easily, they could miss out on a lot of sales, but there are processes you can put in place to help with this. Multichannel sales sequences will ensure prospects receive follow-ups so that missed sales don’t get left.
The drawback of following up is that it can use up a lot of time. Fortunately, you can simplify this, allowing your reps to focus on other prospects.
You can build templates for texts, emails, calls, and visits to reach out to prospects you’ve already been in contact with. For all of these, you can set intervals to ensure things aren’t left too long. Your workers will just need to know the processes to ensure these follow-ups take place and they can let the system do the rest. For example, Fastcall creates planned calls: Call1, Call2, Call3 etc. this helps your team stay on target.
10. Plan Sales Routes
When doing sales over the phone or the internet, a rep can contact clients in whatever order they deem most suitable. If they’re going out to meet clients in person, however, they should try to be as efficient as possible.
Before starting a day of sales, they should have a route planned out so that they can meet with clients in a suitable order. Optimizing their day will ensure they have enough time to meet with every prospect and may help increase the number of visits they can do each day.
Manually planning routes is possible, but the more meetings someone has in a day, the more complicated this will be. You can implement route planning software to quickly generate routes, maximizing efficiency with ease. Geopointe is a great option in Salesforce.
11. Create an Onboarding and Training Plan
You probably already have an onboarding system in place, but is it as efficient as it could be? You should review it from time to time to ensure that new members of your team can hit the ground running.
If you’ve worked for a company for a long time, some things may be second nature to you, but it’s important to teach newer employees more complicated elements in a way that’s easy for them to digest and relate to. This is especially important if you work with complex processes and products.
In terms of training, many companies don’t have the most efficient programs in place. Just because someone has been onboarded, that doesn’t mean they know the job inside and out. With ongoing training, you can ensure that your team is constantly learning and improving.
A typical example of something you can use for sales training is recordings of previous phone calls. You can show your team members the best and worst practices so they can get a better idea of how to conduct themselves on a phone call with a customer.
With strong onboarding and training in place, you can significantly increase sales and productivity throughout your whole team.
12. Treat Salespeople Like Prospects
Your sales reps will be sending information to prospects throughout the buying journey – you should be doing the same with your reps. Look at how they’re spending their time and think about what you can do to help make them more efficient.
Your reps will use a lot of time creating or looking for content to send to their prospects. By looking at different situations, you can use sales enablement tools to suggest suitable content to your reps. This will save them a lot of time, allowing them to be more productive throughout the day.
13. Over Communicate With Your Team
Within all businesses, communication is key to making sure everyone is on the same page and people are working together effectively. You should regularly check in with your sales reps to make sure they’re performing well, and check to see if they’re having any issues. Sometimes people may not go to you with problems they’re having, so encouraging them to talk to you will make it easier for you to take action.
This is especially true for new team members. They might not want to feel like they’re bothering anyone or may be embarrassed if they’re confused about something. Ensure your entire team knows to speak up whenever they need to. Doing so will encourage teamwork, and will help build relationships between your workers.
It’s a good idea to schedule regular one-to-ones to get feedback from your team. This is the perfect time for them to highlight any problems, and you may even be able to get feedback on your own performance as a leader that could help you improve.
14. Use an Accountability Network
When someone isn’t held accountable for their work, it can become easy for them to let things go unfinished. You can implement a system where people hold each other accountable to help motivate everyone to complete their goals and meet deadlines.
You could pair people up to do this, or have multiple people work together to hold each other accountable. Take a look at your team and decide how this can best be implemented.
It’s much easier for someone to make an excuse to themself than to others. Knowing that people will have to report to their team members on their performance will help ensure they perform well and don’t get sidetracked.
15. Celebrate Wins
One of the best ways to encourage people to work hard is by boosting morale. In sales, things can go slow at times, so celebrating the wins is a great way to keep people motivated.
The more encouragement your reps feel, the more they’ll want to perform well. You can also implement certain incentives, such as reward systems, for hitting certain goals or milestones.
How Fastcall Can Help Your Sales Team
No matter how well trained and experienced a sales team is, there are always things that can be done to make improvements. Tools like Fastcall can help your reps with their day-to-day work, making them more efficient and productive.
It’s easy to implement and could significantly increase the performance of your entire team. We offer a free 14-day trial, so click here to try out Fastcall today.
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