4 Ways to Build a More Effective Sales Team

by Kristopher Samuels Writer

Your sales team is the heart of the business – keeping the figurative blood flowing and allowing the business to move healthily and confidently forward. And the same way you’d make proactive, health-conscious decisions to protect your heart, you should work toward bettering your sales team.

An effective sales team is one that keeps up with current technologies, strives toward a common goal, and works to ensure that every team member is doing their personal best. If you’re a sales manager looking to increase sales and revenue but aren’t sure where to start, read the following five tips designed to help you create a more effective team. Even if you’re content with your team’s performance, consider the following.

Embrace Technology

The learning process is never over with sales. As soon as you get comfortable, the future comes knocking with newly improved ways to sell. If you’re floundering while your competitors are succeeding, it might be because you haven’t embraced technology.

Take, for instance, the sales engagement platform – a relatively new platform that allows your reps to engage with better leads, more often, increasing their productivity and leading to more sales. Deploying a sales engagement platform can take you to the next level, but only if you’re willing to take that initial action. The more you stall on technological progress, the more time you give competitors to outpace you.

Don’t Compete. Collaborate.

A competitive sales environment might seem good on paper – you leverage your salespeople’s natural competitive instincts to achieve their personal best – but more often than not, this approach sows acrimony and hostility among team members. All of a sudden, when one salesperson relies on another for help, emotion, ambition, and aggression get in the way.

If you manage an inappropriately competitive sales team, it’s time to refocus priorities. Make it clear to everyone that success isn’t measured with personal quotas and sales; it’s measured through the overall health and well-being of the company. As soon as people think that way, they can support and help one another.

Celebrate Success and Work on Challenges

In your capacity as a manager, you are responsible both for increasing your salespeople’s motivation and improving their performance. The two can sometimes feel at odds. To improve a rep’s performance, for instance, you may have to coach them through their mistakes; focusing on mistakes can sometimes hinder motivation.

To navigate this tricky aspect of management, just make sure to approach both mistakes and successes with positivity. Treat challenges as a learning opportunity, with plenty of encouragement and support. And celebrate successes whenever they arise.

Track Performance

Working through challenges with reps is far easier when you have a clear view of your team’s sales activity and metrics. Again, embracing technology comes in handy here. With sales and lead tracking software, you can easily monitor the performance of individual team members, responding with training or coaching when necessary. You have full access to call activity metrics like their number of dials, number of contacts, the percent of positive vs. negative contacts, etc.

It’s one more way that you can be a proactive, attentive manager.

“Management” is a bit of a misnomer. It isn’t just about managing the team you have; it’s about creating the one you want, through progressive, positive change. Follow these four tips to get started!