As a sales manager, 99% of your success is 100% based on your team’s success. Stop, take a second; and read that again.
How do you build a better sales team? Simply through more training and hands-on experience. It’s exactly like going to the gym, in order to fully understand how your body works, how to train, what to eat and what not, it takes thousands of hours of training to get it right.
Malcolm Gladwell once said that in order to truly become an expert at something, one must do it for 10,000 hours+.
Easiest way to train your team is to:
- Ask yourself what your team does everyday.
- Breakdown each task into an area of improvement.
- Rate each member how good they are on a scale of 1-5 on each area.
- Work together on a 1-3 month plan to improve that particular skill. This can be external workshops, one-on-one coaching, job-shadowing, audio or normal books, seminars, courses, articles and videos.
Key Areas of Improvement include:
- Prospecting, this involves finding new leads and opportunities. How many calls are your reps making daily/ monthly, how many LinkedIn messages are they sending, how many emails, how many follow-ups. Track these numbers overtime, if the conversion rate to get a meeting is still low, maybe they need to change their message.
- Building trust and rapport, people buy from people, period. How well do your reps know the prospect/customer? Your reps need to know the prospect and customer on a much deeper level by asking more questions rather than selling your solution. Thinking with the customer, even if your solution is not the best fit.
- Identifying needs/ Qualification, your reps should be doing 20% of the talking. What questions are they asking? How well are there follow-up questions? You can have 2-3 open-ended questions, and the rest needs to be a smooth conversation, not based on a script. Ask your question, get your answer, ask another question based on that answer i.e “Tell me more, how did it affect you?”. They say you need to ask why 5 times to get to the bottom of things, try 5 follow-up questions on each one of your 2-3 open-ended questions.
- Presenting/ Demoing persuasively, are they able to deliver value? This is 100% based on how well the qualification call went. The more info you got, the more relevant your solution becomes. Pausing is also super important, it helps create impact on specific points your trying to highlight.
- Answering Objections, how well your reps know your solution, customers and competition. Easiest way to get out of an objection is with a question. “Oh your pricing is too high!” – What exactly about it is high? What are you comparing to? What’s your budget for this project? Make sure there are updated battle cards for competition, and constant training for any changes/ updates in your solution.
- Closing the sale, this basically means getting a signature. How well do your reps understand the procurement cycle internally for the customer. Who approves? Who signs? How many signatures? Who could screw it up? What is their legal procedure like? What is their credit score like? All of this can affect the closing date. Negotiation is also part of closing. Being able to create a more appealing offer in exchange for closing faster.
- Renewals & Referrals, what are your customer’s post-purchase experience? Through the lens of an NPS, how likely are they to recommend your solution to others? Being able to identify blockers early on, and clearly set expectations from both side. Customer support is everything. How fast are their technical issues being resolved? Are your reps escalating tickets internally on behalf of the customer? How fast are they updating the customer?
- Time Management, by far the most important one. How much time do your reps spend on revenue-generating activities like prospecting, presenting and closing vs admin work and internal meetings? Reps should spend at least 75% of their day in revenue-generating activities. The most expensive thing about a sales rep is their time. Make sure each rep blocks out each hour on their calendar for a certain activity. Do not let them do anything in that hour but that activity, no matter how important. Track how many activities they do in the hour over time. That’s how you become efficient, by doing more in less time.
