Having to wholly rely on third-party assistance for the products and services you’re marketing seldom creates a good impression with customers. Your company’s capacity for self-sufficiency in dealing with client queries or problems displays your business acumen by demonstrating knowledge and saving people time. In turn, they’re more likely to promote your enterprise to others – growing your brand and building its reputation.
How can you maneuver into a position where your business is self-sufficient in its selling practices? With a little foresight, you can avoid being held hostage by external support structures that delay the resolution of outstanding issues.
1. Choose Team Leaders Wisely
While you are in the position to provide insight and guidance to your sales teams, you must avoid spreading your expertise too widely by encouraging your best performers to assume autonomous leadership roles within specific teams. While performance is an excellent guideline, your prospective leaders should communicate well, be able to make decisions, and be empathetic and emotionally intelligent. They should possess the drive and vision that align with your organization’s goals.
Delegating responsibilities to your leaders allows them to focus on their immediate sales forces and frees you up to resolve potential problems they make you aware of. Their ability to motivate through their methods and actions provides visible examples for other team members, inspiring them further.
2. Assign Appropriate Teams to Leaders
Choosing the best sales teams to work under a leader’s guidance is essential to getting the best out of them. Salespeople are not robotic, with each having characteristics and selling styles – from the way they dress to the language they use – that set them apart from others. By identifying which leaders and members of your sales force best suit specific accounts or clients, you can build and grow teams that best represent your organization in targeted environments.
Varying personalities will acclimatize quicker to working environments if teamed with others who possess traits that gel with them. For example, if you have a team leader who is dogmatic and confident when chasing a sale, it may be best to pair them with members who are great openers but may be slow on following up leads. In this way, the leader will ensure prompt follow-ups. Your responsibility is to find the most well-matched units to provide autonomy and harmony within your sales force.
3. Provide Training and Education Above the Essentials
With expert teams in place, you know your products and services will gain traction in the marketplace. A proper focus on essential soft skills like communication, decision-making, teamwork, influence and time management will encourage your sales teams to be more self-sufficient in their selling practices. Being adept at problem-solving shows structured thinking with logic-based reasoning, which are major assets in sales.
Alongside this soft skill education, introduce additional product and service training that will minimize the need for external support. Provide relevant documentation to fall back on, such as answers to product and service FAQs that provide enhanced understanding. This will enable your teams to answer queries and solve problems armed with information that encourages confidence and autonomy.
Give this additional education and training to your leaders first, offering incentives based on how successfully they present them to their teams. They will acknowledge your efforts with an even more concerted focus on growing their group’s performance. Due to their leadership positions, qualities and the respect they command, they will be in the position to host this training for their workers.
4. Assess Sales Staff Performances
You will rely on sales figures and feedback from team leaders to assess your sales staff’s comparative performances. There will be times when someone finds their role challenging, either through a lack of productivity, aptitude or professional achievement — often, you will find a combination of all three.
If an underperforming salesperson approaches you early on, you can make a call to provide additional assistance via additional training or a refresher course. Generally, you will find that, although weaker performers realize their underachievement, they carry on regardless until you take action against them. Your team leader will likely bring their consistent underperformance to your attention. At this point, termination is usually the only option you have. A weak link can destabilize an entire chain.
5. Encourage Innovation and Experimentation
Encourage your sales team leaders to innovate and experiment within the boundaries of your company’s mandate. Talented people should be free to introduce innovative approaches that benefit their employees’ daily processes and development. Of course, you should authorize the implementation of such approaches beforehand, but your support of noteworthy suggestions encourages a proactive and self-sufficient landscape among your leaders that filters down to their teams.
Supporting your teams with the necessary tools to implement these approaches cements your encouragement of sales force autonomy. Perhaps a leader asks to set up a direct line of communication with a specific supplier representative for quicker answers to involved and urgent client queries. Support the initiative by arranging the same with the supplier. Obviously, it’s your prerogative how much experimentation and innovation you allow, but avoid disregarding an opportunity for success point blank unless you immediately identify why the approach will fail.
Increasing Team Autonomy Reduces External Support Needs
Clearly, there will be times when specific problems or issues require the expert feedback that external support provides. By educating and training an optimal sales force, including suitable goal-oriented team leaders who possess exceptional problem-solving skills, you will reduce your company’s need for outside help.
Doing so will improve your sales levels and after-sales assistance through quicker and more efficient product and service knowledge.
