How to effectively manage a sales team?

If you want to learn how to manage a sales team, you've come to the right place. You're about to get actionable insights from the top experts who've all been there (and done it) before. Managing a sales team is certainly a challenge, but until you have managed or been part of a sales team. Let's be honest, managing a successful sales team is tough.

The lessons I share below come from the many mentors and leaders I've had the good fortune to learn from, but tailored to a sales environment.

Let's go

1. Help Them Stay Organized…Beyond CRM

Salespeople tend to spend most of their time on their customer relationship management (or CRM) platform. This is the area where they can keep track of all notes and details regarding the deals they are working on. While this encourages staying organized at the transaction (tactical) level, it doesn't necessarily help at the high (strategic) level.

Operating in a new business role takes a huge amount of time and where that time can be allocated is extremely variable. If a prospect doesn't show up for an hour or so meeting, walk out with a "Yes!" We're ready to sign the deal,” can have a dramatic effect on how a sales rep handles their day (and night).

To help our sales team stay organized outside of deal specifics, we've instituted an agile project management framework called scrum which helps create alignment within the team. With Scrum, reps should plan in weekly increments in a “ sprint " share.

This makes them accountable to the rest of the team for completing planned activities, but also remain adaptable to change.

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Tracking these activities within an overall project management tool creates high-level visibility for reps and myself as to when a deal has the potential to close or when the written agreement can -be send.

2. Be results-oriented

Hire motivated and determined people. Create a very transparent environment focused on key sales indicators. Ultimately, when you bring competitive people together in a transparent environment, the whole organization moves up and to the right. Be sure to focus on results so people don't confuse activity with productivity.

3. Identify where you are and what you need

Before you learn how to manage a sales team, you need to build one. Identify the category to which your potential recruits belong, builders versus producers. Builders develop from scratch. They start from nothing. Producers grow once everything is in place. Most people are not good at both. Know what stage you are in and what type of vendor you need, and ask questions to separate builders from producers.

4. Clarify Your Sales Model

There are two main sales models to choose from: the island and the assembly line. Let's look at each in more detail:

1. The Island: this is the traditional approach to selling where each salesperson on the team is responsible for every aspect of the sales process. They generate their own leads, make their own sales calls, close their own deals, and more. It's an easy model to implement and manage as there aren't a lot of moving parts to worry about.

2. The assembly line: The assembly line method distributes sales rights among four different groups. There's the core build team, sales development reps, account executives, and customer success associates. Each group deals with prospects and customers at different stages of the buyer's journey.

Both models described above can be effective. The one you choose for your organization largely depends on the phase your business is in. For example, the island method generally works best for startups, but the assembly line methodology is generally ideal for established brands.

5. Assign Clear Roles And Responsibilities

Everyone on your team should know exactly what their role is. If they don't, you can't expect them to consistently hit the targets. The trick is to allocate responsibilities in correlation with personal skills. It's much easier if your business uses the chain selling model, described above.

For example, you can manage an employee who is dynamite when it comes to generating leads, but crumbles like a cookie every time they have to speak with a potential client. This person should be invited to join the lead generation team and allowed to focus on what they do best.

Do your best to assign tasks and responsibilities to those who have the best chance of completing them.

6. Manage expectations accordingly

You want to motivate your team and do all you can to support them. I think everyone knows what overperformance looks like, but few have defined what underperformance looks like. Are you comfortable with a salesperson who consistently works at 90% of quota or one who may be at 150% one month and well below the next?

7. Set the bar high

When sales goals are high (but achievable), there is something worth pursuing and your group should believe that anything is possible. If you only reach 70% of an ambitious goal, you do better than reach 100% of a mediocre goal, as long as there is a collective nirvana about what is being built that fuels your success.

8. Focus on Account Training

Embed continuous learning into the culture; emphasize and invest in training and professional development. Any successful sales organization should have a steady cadence of training that constantly develops the fundamentals of product knowledge, competitive intelligence, prospecting, opportunity management, territory planning, and professional communications.

9. Use the volume/value ratio

Your most valuable (dearest) people should be spending time on the least big (but most important) activities — like building relationships, getting referrals, and getting partnerships. Your low-value people need to focus on higher-volume activities, like turning leads into leads. This is also true for prospects. Seek less, but better prospects.

10. Assume there is no single solution

You have many different personalities working for you. Your role is that of mentor and facilitator. You want to protect your team from inside politics or bad sales behavior, make it easy for them to focus on the job at hand, and be more successful. Different people need to be managed differently – figure out what motivates each of them and push those buttons to develop better salespeople overall.

11. Set up a Sales CRM

Unfortunately, most sellers only spend 35% of their time to sell. Which means your sales team probably spends two-thirds of their time on tasks that aren't directly related to selling products and increasing revenue.

A good sales CRM can help your team win back a significant chunk of their day, especially if you invest in one with automation capabilities. Sometimes managing a sales team just comes down to giving your reps the tools they need to be successful.

12. Identify activity metrics and performance indicators (KPIs)

So many things in business are beyond our control. For example, we don't decide the next big trend or when natural disasters occur. If we did, trends would almost never change and hurricanes would not exist. Sales activity metrics measure things that we can control.

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In most cases, we decide how many cold calls to make per day, how many times we're willing to follow up with leads, and so on. When managing sales reps, it's important to consider these numbers.

Track sales activity metrics such as number of leads created, number of calls made, and meetings scheduled for each of your reps, as well as standard KPIs.

13. Encourage Your Team

A commission is a percentage of a sale, awarded to the seller who closed the deal. For example, a fee of $ 25 would be paid to a seller each time he sells a product worth $500 with 5% commission.

An incentive, on the other hand, is any reward given to a salesperson who achieves a predetermined level of excellence. Incentives are used to motivate sellers.

When you lead a sales team, part of your job is to motivate them to work as hard as they can. This is why incentives are so powerful. Choose an incentive plan for your team that will excite them and inspire them to go the extra mile.

14. Establish communication channels

Communication is the key to successful management of a sales team. If you can't contact your reps, or worse, if they can't contact you, your business won't close as many deals as it could. Make sure your team has multiple channels to contact you, from any device, even if they're attending field sales meetings.