When you’re managing a sales team, figuring out what to change to improve the bottom line can be difficult. Few managerial roles put so many moving parts, egos, and technical issues together in the way sales can, so optimizing a sales team isn’t as simple as others may think. That said, there are a few things any good sales manager should be doing to get their team in line. These sales management tips should push you in the right direction towards a high-productivity, high-morale team:

Keep Studying the Art of Sales and Sales Management

If you’re reading these sales management tips, you’re already headed in the right direction. Information and knowledge rule sales no matter the industry, so follow a few useful sales information sources to keep abreast of the latest sales techniques, networking concepts, useful technologies, and the like. If at all possible, you want to know as much or more than any member of your team, so you can put these sales management tips to optimal use.

Know About Your Customers

Of course, that’s just the general half of the puzzle. You also want to know as much as you can about the specifics of your business. Here are a few sales management tips for knowing customers

• Make sure you understand your customers and potential customers: their needs, their wants, their concerns, their complaints. If you’re cold calling, know names, titles, and other specifics. If you’re following up with a customer, know everything!
• Understand what you are selling, and what the competition is selling; answers to tough questions and advice a customer didn’t know they needed should both come to you naturally and easily, if you understand your product and its role well enough.
• Know what’s on the horizon-what will customers need tomorrow, not today.

Use the Right Tools

Tools alone won’t make a bad salesperson a good one (and a short list of sales management tips can’t make gold out of lead), but they might shape a mediocre sales team made up of good workers into a good sales team. To enumerate every useful tool would be the work of several articles, but for starters:

• 1. A quality CRM solution that fits your team
• 2. One or more sources of performance metrics; KISSmetrics for web analytics, etc.
• 3. Communication software; Toutapp to optimize email communication in-team and outside, Postwire for sharing resource pages effectively.

Set Goals and Incentives

Your team needs to have:

1) Useful metrics and 2) A reason to perform.

With the right tools, you should have all the metrics you could possibly need-figure out what’s correlating best with the success of the company and set appropriate goals. No list of sales management tips would be complete without mentioning incentives, but most sales management tips neglect to mention on thing: any system is going to make workers optimize their work to system, not for the betterment of the company. Plan accordingly. Personalized non-cash incentives work best for a few reasons-cash rewards lose their association with good work in the worker’s mind very quickly according to studies on the subject!

Communicate Regularly

Every morning, after you’ve knocked out a few tasks for the day, have a quick session with your team to discuss goal, get everyone on the same page, make sure these sales management tips are doing some good. Communication is key for keeping teams motivated, on task, and working towards a unified end. Just don’t let it become the downfall of productivity-constant email where a phone call or face-to-face would be faster being the most common culprit.

Remember that these sales management tips all have a flip side–too much study and not enough work, useless tools, etc.