Being the manager of a successful sales team isn’t a passive supervisory role in which you only instruct and observe. While you can reasonably expect everyone to contribute certain skill sets towards their sales efforts, it is unreasonable to expect that their success should be wholly dependent on their own initiative. A great manager needs to be engaged, supportive, and adaptive. Here are seven ways that you can give your sales team the resources that they need to reach their full potential.
Give Them Technology to Help Them Use Their Time Efficiently
Time may be your sales team’s most important nonrenewable resource. Giving them vital technological tools aimed at maximizing their ability to use time efficiently provides them with a tremendous advantage. Delivery routing software is one of the best examples of technology that can help your team allocate time wisely. A sales team that’s on the road a lot has to chart out its destinations with precision in order to be time-efficient; give them a tool that enables them to effortlessly optimize routes.
Make it Easy to Track and Manage Leads
Good customer relationship management software shouldn’t focus only on existing customer relationships. Instead, it should incorporate ways to generate and manage active leads. A CRM platform that can give your team a streamlined way to communicate with leads and keep their outreach efforts organized can help them consistently convert leads into customers. A delivery routing software can help you a lot in management and sales.
Establish Mentorship Programs
Your newest team members can stand to learn a lot from senior staff. Partnering staff with mentors will give them practical and informed perspective from someone with firsthand insight. Mentors can impart what they’ve learned from past successes and mistakes and empower new team members to shape their own winning strategies.
Don’t Put Your Team Members Against One Another
Some managers think that competition among team members has a motivating influence, but it can really tend to have the opposite effect. Having to compete can detract from the team driven dynamics of a positive sales environment, and it deters individuals from providing one another with meaningful support. Don’t limit incentives to top performers; make the same incentives available to everyone. In fact, group based incentives that reward the efforts of the whole team can be a great motivator. Also, while it’s great to acknowledge achievement, don’t make individuals’ achievements become the metrics for another individual’s failure.
Create Regular Times to Check In
Meeting with your team members regularly can provide them with essential structure and guidance. You can help them plan how to use their time and let them know about specific priorities within a given week or month. Moreover, it provides a forum in which people will feel free to ask important questions.
People may be reluctant to come to a manager with questions when it requires them to initiate a communication or create what could be perceived as interruption. Ongoing meeting times are a great way to touch base with your team and help them stay on course, and it also helps you to budget your time wisely.
Offer Ongoing Training Opportunities
The training that you give your team shouldn’t be limited to their initial onboarding and orientation. Ongoing training will allow them to continually develop their sales skills and stay on top of new developments in your operations, such as prospecting training.
Help Your Team Avoid Burnout
The pressures of a results-oriented sales environment can push some of your hardest working team members to exceed their own endurance. When burnout sets in, it can be extremely tolling on an individual’s performance. Some good ways to prevent burnout are to focus on evenly distributing workload, giving people the opportunity to take time off when needed, and offer flexibility about working remotely.
Your sales team’s success will be commensurate with your efforts as a manager. When you take steps to equip them for success, you can continually reaffirm your commitment to your team and keep raising standards for excellence.
