8 years ago
April 13, 2016

How to Develop Your Sales Team

Your business relies on a talented, driven, and productive sales team in order to turn a profit. Find out how to develop your sales team for success.

Rhys Metler

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Your sales team is vital to your company’s success. The better your reps are, the more products or services you can sell, and the higher your profits will be. Developing a sales team that is talented, driven, motivated, and highly productive is a goal most CEOs and sales managers share. However, it’s not so easy to develop a stellar sales team. It takes strategy, commitment, and hard work.

When you make sales productivity a top priority and use these steps below, you can develop your sales team for success.

Use a Sales Staffing Firm to Hire the Right Sales People

The first step to developing your sales team is to hire the right sales people. It’s a lot easier to have a highly productive sales team if its members are talented and right for the job. Hiring the wrong sales people will hurt your sales, damage relationships with your clients, lower your profit margin, ruin your reputation, and waste your valuable time and money.

When hiring, consider using a sales staffing agency—these firms are equipped with the experience, knowledge, metrics, and tools needed to find the ideal candidates for your company. They’ll consider not only skills and past experience but also fit within your company culture to ensure long-term hires.

Create an Onboarding Program

Sales has a high turnover rate, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Sales people often quit because they don’t think they can get the job done, because they aren’t making any sales, and because they simply don’t know how to get better. When you create an effective onboarding program, you can arm your new hires with the tools they need to succeed. Your program should include measureable and achieving learning goals, such as completing mentoring sessions, product training, knowledge quizzes, and their first sales calls. Use best practice guidelines and help your sales team succeed from the very start.

Develop a Training Program

If you’ve been in business for a while, you know who your top sales people are. Find out what they have in common and build metrics that can be used in a repeatable training program. All of your reps should be trained on the proven techniques, attitudes, and skills that have been used repeatedly to generate new business, convert leads, and close deals.

Build a Culture of Coaching

When you coach your sales team, you can get real-time feedback and engage with reps often and early, so you don’t wait until it’s too late. If you’re only looking at performance once every quarter, you can’t drive up productivity and make up those lost dollars as quickly as you could if you noticed problems right away and worked with your sales team to fix them.

From the moment you hire reps, you should take advantage of every coaching opportunity that comes up, rather than wait until you see negative behaviours. Every interaction is a potential opportunity to work with your sales team, to challenge them, and to support them to achieve higher levels of performance.

However, your team’s coaching will only be as effective as your coach is. To ensure that you’re driving performance, your sales manager must have the skills, knowledge, and tools needed to properly coach your reps. Your sales manager should be a teacher, a cheerleader, a guide, and a facilitator who helps and inspires your team to be the best it can be.

Celebrate Successes and Achievements

Your sales team will slowly become unmotivated if you’re not recognizing and celebrating their successes. Your reps work hard and they deserve to hear some praise, win prizes, and receive bonuses when warranted. Don’t take your sales team for granted. Appreciate, acknowledge, and celebrate their wins.

Rhys Metler

Rhys is a tenacious, top performing Senior Sales Recruiter with 15+ years of focused experience in the Digital Media, Mobile, Software, Technology and B2B verticals. He has a successful track record of headhunting top performing sales candidates for some of the most exciting brands in North America. He is a Certified Recruitment Specialist (CRS) and has expert experience in prospecting new business, client retention/renewals and managing top performing sales and recruitment teams. Rhys enjoys spending quality time with his wife, son, and daughters, BBQing on a hot summer day and tropical vacations.

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