As a sales manager, you play a critical role in the success of your sales team. You set the expectations, the tone, and the culture of the work environment. If your sales reps are unmotivated, hostile, lazy, or having trouble making sales, that’s on you. It’s your responsibility to get your people to become the best reps your firm has ever seen. It’s up to you to make changes and improvements in your own sales management in order to foster a more productive team.

Consider implementing these powerful sales management strategies this year.

1. Sales Coaching

You’re always drilling into your sales people about the necessity for constant training and development, but you might not take your own advice. Taking a sales coaching course can help you improve your sales management style considerably, which will allow you to be a better leader.

Take time to identify the learning styles and personality types in your team, then provide one-on-one sales coaching sessions. Adequate sales coaching can help develop your sales people’s skills and confidence and allow them to aim higher and accomplish more.

2. Set Developmental Goals

Not everything has to be about hitting numbers. Setting developmental goals with your sales people—tangible goals around attitude and habit improvements and skill and knowledge acquisition goals—can help you to create a well-rounded team.

3. Set Realistic Goals

The goals you set should be challenging, but also realistic based on the sales professionals’ individual skill sets. By assessing and evaluating skills and learning curves and setting individual goals for your sales people, you can help them see more successes, and thus, give them the confidence to strive for larger challenges moving forward.

Setting unrealistic goals may not allow for the best environment for growth. It’ll just reduce morale and confidence.

4. Recognize and Appreciate

All too often, sales management revolves around the delivery of criticism or bad news. If negativity makes up the majority of your communication with your team, things need to change. You should be regularly celebrating good news, praising good work, and appreciating results and effort. A little appreciation can go a long way to creating a resilient and motivated team that performs better. If your sales people feel like they can never do anything right, they’ll stop trying.

5. Maximize Employee Skills and Talents

Your sales people might be underperforming because they’re being set up to fail. It’s important to match tasks and responsibilities with specific skills and talents. Don’t pigeonhole your sales people into one role—especially one that they aren’t good at. Have ongoing conversations about interests and skills, and allow your team members to realize their potential by giving them tasks that they enjoy and are good at. This will maximize employee skills and talents and improve employee loyalty.

6. Convey Approachability

Approachability should be a key aspect of your sales management style. If you’re always working behind closed doors, seemingly unavailable to your team when it needs help, has questions, or has concerns, you create a disconnect with your sales people. Keep your door open, build trust, and make yourself more approachable. This will promote solidarity.

7. Building the Best Team

Some sales people will underperform regardless of any sales coaching or effort you put in to help them excel. Some sales people aren’t coachable. Some sales people simply do not know how to sell. One of the most important sales management strategies to take on in 2016 is to prioritize the recruitment and hiring of top sales talent. Be committed to only hiring the best talent available—no mediocre performers. Building the best team is an important step in sales management, one that cannot be understated.