As a sales manager, it’s important that you continually take new courses of action to help your team generate more sales.
Here are six practical methods you should consider.
1. One-on-One Coaching
By helping your sales representatives to become more skilled and confident in their approaches, regular coaching is crucial.
Yes, as a sales manager you’re sure to have a busy schedule, so finding the time to coach your team to assist them in their skills and confidence levels may be difficult. But don’t lose sight of the end goal.
You want your team to make more sales, so putting aside time for coaching is ultimately worthwhile. When your sales team receives proper coaching on a regular basis, each member will be much better prepared to close deals.
Just make sure you also give your salespeople room for flexibility and other freedoms. Coaching is all about helping your sales agents to maximize their potential via learning. It isn’t about simply telling them what to do.
2. Making Sure Different Tools are 'Talking' to One another Using APIs
In basic terms, an application programming interface is a software intermediary that enables two applications to ‘talk’ to one another.
An API communicates via a set of protocols, allowing it to act as a middleman between web-based systems, database systems, operating systems, and computer hardware, to complete specific tasks.
That means you gain more effective communication between each of your sales tools. In turn, that helps your team to make more sales.
To ensure all of your tools are always effectively communicating with each other, it’s vital that you stay on top of API development life cycle management, which involves considerations such as monetization, design, analytics, and security.
3. Setting Realistic High Goals
Setting realistic high goals is one of the best practical methods of helping your sales team to close more deals. However, you also need to give your team the necessary guidance to reach those goals.
By setting targets that are high but realistic, you give each member of your sales team the chance to increase his or her confidence. And when your sales representatives realize they actually can reach higher goals, they will be much more able to keep reaching those goals.
Bear in mind that you should not set goals too high. You don’t want the targets to be impossible to attain. But by gradually nudging your team towards higher goals, you can undoubtedly improve your team’s confidence and generate more sales.
Consider setting a high goal that around 70% of your team will be able to reach. If you go lower than that, you risk making the target too difficult to reach. In turn, that will cause your team to become frustrated and less productive.
Getting the balance right is crucial, so make sure you go through the figures first to determine what a realistic high-goal would be.
4. Using CRM Tools
Customer relationship management (CRM) software will help your sales team to manage all elements of their relationships with customers. In turn, that means they can make more sales. CRM tools basically serve as a single location where all customer data is stored, and accessible to your sales representatives.
By adopting CRM tools, you and your team can gain valuable insights into the statuses of each and every one of your customer relationships. The more valuable data you are able to access, the more you can adapt processes and strategies accordingly to help your team generate more sales.
Using CRM software also enables you to get insights into the overall health of your business.
5. Utilizing Sales automation Tools
Sales automation tools have a more direct effect on your sales team to make more sales. Automation tools automate various elements of the sales process, including data entry, scheduling, follow-ups, personalized communication, and sales pipeline management.
When you utilize sales automation tools, some of your team’s tasks and processes become redundant, which enables your salespeople to spend more time on closing deals.
Various day-to-day processes can be automated to help simplify tasks and increase efficiency in all components of the sales process.
6. Identifying Your Team's Barriers to Achieving More Sales
Quite simply, by identifying your team’s barriers to achieving more sales, you can help each member close more deals. Barriers include not having the tools they need, feeling rejected, poor communication, and more.
Tools can include things like CRM software and sales automation tools, so if that’s a barrier to sales reps making more sales, it’s easily fixable. As for the fear of being rejected, coaching and spending time listening to an employee’s concerns can help the team member overcome his or her fear.
Rejection will happen every day in sales, but you need to help salespeople who are becoming negatively affected by rejection to find new confidence.
Other practical things you can do to boost your sales team’s confidence include providing scripts that address customer concerns and ensuring they thoroughly understand how your company’s products or services help the customer.
Lastly, poor communication can be a major barrier to your team achieving more sales. Too many salespeople believe talking is the key to closing a deal, when actually, listening is just as important, if not more so.
Your sales team must adopt active listening skills to know how best to approach the specific needs and wants of each individual customer.
When your sales reps’ calls with customers feel more like a conversation than a pitch, your company will build longer-lasting relationships with its customers and your sales team will make more sales.
