The goal of every sales manager and forward-minded member of the sales team under that manager-is to improve team results, reaching for maximum efficiency and efficacy. Even if your sales team features the best collection of talent and drive you could possibly hope for, there are always new heights you can push for. Fortunately, there are countless paths you can take to empower your sales team and really bring out that hidden potential; we’ll discuss three of the most potent in this article.

Personal Solutions

Part of building a strong team is recognizing the different needs and strengths of the members of that team. By taking the time to develop strategies on a team level and an individual level, you’ll find you end up with a sales team must stronger than you would ignoring one or the other. Here are a few areas where a personal touch makes a big difference:

Motivation: People work hard for different reasons. Understand your sales team members and come up with ways to get the best work out of them.  Performance-based incentives typically fail because they create systems to game; personalized incentives work much better!

Coaching: Recognizing the weaknesses of individual members and working to alleviate them will give you a much stronger team than unfocused efforts even could.

Team Roles: A personal understanding of your team gives you the insight you need to effectively delegate duties; perhaps a member of your team excels at closing and another at cold calls. You’ll only find these strengths and put them to work of the sales team if you pay attention to the little picture.

Team Organization

To bring your sales team to a new level, you need to make sure it’s working as a team to begin with. Holding daily team meetings is the absolute least you should be doing on this front; by sitting down with everyone each morning, you can maintain cohesion and goal orientation, spot developing problems and develop answering solutions quickly, and keep morale high.

When possible, let your team work together on projects-they’ll reinforce each other’s weaknesses, make optimal use of each other’s strengths, and hold one another accountable to a greater degree than fully independent efforts could allow. If you followed the first section’s advice, you should have a decent grasp of the best way to do this.

Appropriate Tools

You probably don’t have a limitless budget to spend on every hot piece of productivity software on the market, but with careful research and an understanding of your team, you should be able to find a few ‘sure bets’ on the market-you might even be missing some key tool available completely free.

Talk to the people on your team and find out what problems they have-where there’s a problem, there’s probably a solution waiting. Don’t forget the old solutions; sometimes a pack of sticky notes works just as well as the latest iPhone app!