Every business needs great salespeople, which means competition in recruitment is often intense. In the startup space, top sales reps are in a position to demand higher wages, especially if they are being brought in with the expectation of providing instant results. This can make them unaffordable for many organizations.
A more strategic alternative, hiring salespeople with a focus on upskilling them could yield higher returns. In this scenario, you can use your budget far more efficiently by investing in potential. Showing commitment toward reps can go a long way, inspiring greater loyalty amongst them toward the company, and decreasing the chances of churn.
As a sales manager, you can often get more out of your existing sales teams than you might think. If your business has poor sales workflows in place, simply hiring more reps will just set everyone up for failure. To make the most out of your hires and increase sales without breaking your budget, here are five tips for sales leaders.
Create Effective Templates
It’s difficult to expect consistent performance from your sales team if they all need to use their own intuition to go about their daily jobs. Rather, it’s more efficient to create company-wide optimized templates that include everything a rep needs to know such as pricing, commission structure, processes and more.
You can consult your top performers in this process and take the best aspects from each to create a unified approach. All these templates together can form a master playbook for new employees to learn from and experienced reps to refer to.
Companies can build from the ground up or leverage existing publicly available templates such as those offered by DemandMetric. This can significantly reduce the time needed to get everything up and running.
Find the Right Structure for Your Team
There are three key types of structures for sales teams and as a manager, it’s your responsibility to find the one that works best for your team. Choosing the right structure often depends on company size and culture, and can largely impact the productivity of team members. Let’s take a look at the three:
- The Island: Here, every sales rep is on their own in a hyper competitive environment. This is common in traditional sales but is rapidly becoming unpopular as we learn more about human behavior.
- The Assembly Line: Common in the startup world, each rep focuses on a specific pipeline stage and then passes it on to someone else on their team. This enables team members to play towards their strengths.
- The Pod: The sales department is split into smaller self-contained and self-managing teams. This structure is gaining popularity because it allows greater autonomy but is still specialized. For example, Cognism recently switched from the assembly line to the pod because it creates a more seamless customer experience.
Paying attention to your reps’ needs and putting the right team structure in place can go a long way for driving productivity. At the end of the day, reps are human, and it’s important to understand what they’re going through and what their preferences are.
Leverage the Latest Tech
In today’s day and age, it’s becoming harder to find an area in which technology can’t help the process. With bigger work plates and far less time to devote to a variety of tasks, leveraging the right technology can help free up sales managers to focus more on administrative tasks and less on individually coaching each representative. For reps, the right technology can drastically help them find more leads and close more deals.
AI is being used in innovative ways, such as by Outreach AI, whose platform helps with a variety of tasks along the sales workflow, including generating leads. Other platforms are helping sellers perform better on calls using post-call data analysis, while others, such as Demoleap, offer live sales coaching. Previously, managers would take too much time to watch and train their reps. Demoleap automates this process in real-time, giving reps an “AI assistant” during live calls that shares prompts and even autopilots the click track for the rep, allowing them to focus on speaking while the AI handles the gritty, navigation work of the presentation.
Keep Your Team Learning
Best practices in sales techniques are constantly changing with new technological advancements and emerging trends. Even if your team is currently on the cutting edge, if you do not invest in further training, they will eventually fall behind. Training can be both formal and informal depending on the characteristics of your team.
For example, informal training can be as simple as encouraging team members to take Hubspot’s free Sales Training course. Additionally, training materials could be embedded in emails or shared on the company Slack channel. Sales team members should be encouraged to share helpful content.
In a more formal manner, top performers could be asked to give presentations about their working techniques. This way, winning recipes can be shared cross-company and can be incentivized by bonuses or awards so team members can willingly give away their secrets.
Company videos can be recorded and hosted on Vimeo to stay private but also easily accessible to all employees without any hassle.
Mentorships
An age-old method that is still incredibly effective is setting up an internal mentorship program within your sales department. The idea is to pair up high-performing team members with lower performers.
Ideally, the pair should be a part of the same sales team so you can introduce team-performance related KPIs. This ensures a strong incentive for the mentor to invest in helping the mentee because it directly affects his or her financial gain. You can offer further bonuses for mentors who inspire the greatest increase in sales for their mentee.
Because the mentor is not a manager, it’s a valuable opportunity for reps to gain nuanced, ground-up feedback from their peers at regular intervals without being held back by company procedures.
Organizations can get so much more out of their sales teams if they put the right processes and structures in place. As a sales manager, this can help you immensely increase your team’s revenue without overly driving up your costs.
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