Picture this: you have a sales team that generates leads left and right, brings in new business every day and closes every single sale it goes after. Well, sure, this might be unrealistic, but you can definitely have a stellar sales team that can efficiently close deals and increase sales. You just need to know how to build a sales team that’s efficient, productive, and profitable. With proper forethought and planning, you can do it-it just takes a few steps.

Job Description

In order to understand if your current sales team is working effectively, you need to figure out exactly what you are expecting your sales representatives to be doing. Are they in charge of generating leads? Are they in charge of post-sales activities, like customer service? Will they all be in charge of both large and small accounts or will they be separated based on experience? What are you expecting your sales representatives to be doing during the day? What are their actual job duties? Once you figure this out, it’s going to be a lot easier to evaluate your sales force’s performance.

Evaluate

Hopefully, once you evaluate your sales team, you’ll see that it’s working perfectly the way it is. However, this likely won’t be the case. But the only way you’ll find out if you need to change how things work is to evaluate current performance. Look at sales strategies, talk to reps, and discuss the team’s strengths and weaknesses with your sales manager or your top performers. Do you see any areas that could use some revamping? Are your reps struggling to juggle too many accounts on their own? Do inexperienced reps have too many important responsibilities that should be given to senior account managers? There are many factors to consider while evaluating your team, but performing a thorough analysis is the only way to truly understand what needs to change in order to build a sales team you can be proud of.

Measure

To build a stronger sales team, you’ll need to measure their sales productivity. This means measuring each rep’s sales numbers in dollar amounts to figure out if they’re underperforming based on the average. You might have a few sales people who seem to be carrying the heavy load and others who are consistently underperforming and bringing in less money. If this is the case, your employees and hiring practices might be the problems you need to address.

The Right Reps

Dollar amounts aren’t everything. Your reps might be bringing in a decent amount of money but actually costing you more money by ruining relationships with clients that you’ve worked so hard to build. You can see if a rep is providing bad service or rubbing clients the wrong way if your clients are dropping like flies or constantly filing complaints. Hiring the wrong sales people can destroy your reputation, cost your business, and create unnecessary problems. If this is the case, you might have to cut some reps loose and replace them with more efficient sales people-using revamped hiring practices to get the top talent.

The Right Solution

No one solution is right when building a great sales team. The issues you might be having with your team will be unique to your company, so the solutions you choose must be based on your evaluation and analysis. Perhaps your sales force just needs a better compensation package. Perhaps you need to add on or remove some reps. Maybe you need to shift accounts around. Only you will know which solution is best for your sales team.

Sales people drive your business’s growth by nurturing relationships with clients, generating new business, and closing sales. But for this to happen, you need to build a sales team that you can be proud of. By following the steps detailed above, you can create the perfect sales force.