You have faith in your sales team. You know your salespeople are good at what they do. They work hard and they bring in revenue. But maybe they could do better. Maybe they could sell more, sell more efficiently, and sell faster if you gave them what they needed to unleash their power. Well, with these five secrets, you can do just that.

Coaching

Many sales managers have too much faith in their salespeople. They let them do what they need to do to close deals, and stay out of the process as much as possible. After all, they’re busy with sales forecasts and other administrative and managerial tasks. So they let their salespeople take care of making the sale.

But you can improve your sales team by getting more involved and providing one-on-one coaching. Talk to your team members to discover what struggles and challenges they face, what they think they could do better, and what they might need to increase their sales. Once asked, your salespeople will probably be very open and honest.

Once you have these answers, you can go one by one and work on the problems they’ve stated in order to get better results. The key is to work closely with each salesperson instead of coaching to a large group as a whole. Each one will have his or her own challenges, so coaching one on one and focusing on behaviours instead of outcomes will provide better results.

Sales Tools

Sometimes, a sales team just needs the right sales tools in order to optimize performance. A good sales-focused CRM system can keep your team organized and focused, and eliminate many of the administrative tasks that keep them away from selling. Collaboration, communication, email, and networking tools can also make a big difference in their level of efficiency, allowing them to close deals more efficiently and quickly than before.

Offer Training Opportunities

The best sales organizations understand that they must invest in the development of their salespeople if they want to see better results. If you want top performers, develop them. Provide them with training opportunities that can help them do their job better. Whether it’s technical training for your products or sales process training for best practices, a well-planned training program can provide an excellent ROI. Providing opportunities for development can not only help you make mediocre salespeople great but it can also help you retain your top performers.

Implement Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing can do wonders for the success of your sales team. Not only will it generate a full pipeline of leads for your reps to follow up on, but it will also ensure that those leads are sales qualified through lead nurturing before they get passed on to your reps, so they won’t waste time on prospects who ultimately won’t end up buying. If you’re still using outdated sales and marketing processes that focus largely on outbound methods, it’s time to implement inbound marketing.

Hire Smart

Although a not-so-secret secret, hiring smart now and in the future can help you get the best salespeople on your team. The best way to deal with lackluster, unmotivated, and unproductive salespeople is to avoid having them on your sales team to begin with. But hiring for sales can be tricky—not every seemingly qualified candidate will have what it takes to succeed in the field. If it seems like you’re constantly hiring duds, consider engaging the services of a sales recruiting company to handle the task for you. The experienced and skilled recruiters will be able to differentiate the good from the bad and ensure you’re only onboarding quality salespeople from now on.