How to Improve the Performance of Your Sales Team

No matter whether it is a small or prosperous company, everybody wants to sell more. But how to achieve that result? How to increase sales team performance? What techniques can be applied to sell more? Let’s have a look at this question in greater detail.

What Is Sales Performance?

This term means how effective the members of your sales team are when it comes to setting goals and achieving them. Sales revenue is the main factor that helps measure performance. However, there are some other metrics that can also influence this indicator, such as the amount of repeat business and time spent per client.

A service or product can’t sell itself (no matter how qualitative it is). That’s why your success is contingent on the professionalism of your sales team that requires at least one member who understands how to sell and knows for sure how to increase your revenue.

What Factors Affect Sales Performance?

If you are a revenue-based company, you need to do your best to drive sales performance. But first, you need to understand what particular factors influence sales performance indicators:

• Sagging economy. A poor economy is probably the main reason that can cause a drop in sales. In such a scenario, business owners have no choice and are made to decrease the pricing policy until the situation changes for the better.
• Bad individual performance. If the members of your sales team aren’t motivated, in all likelihood, the results will be poor.
• Poor sales forecasting. Placing unrealistic expectations can lead to poor sales performance.
• Incorrect sales pipeline. If the sales pipeline is too long and improperly organized, this also negatively influences the general sales performance.

What Are the Best Strategies That Can Improve Your Sales Team Performance?

Now, it is time to move on to discussing the most effective ways to improve sales performance. If you don’t use them, we recommend paying attention to these techniques. Thanks to them, you’ll finally understand how to improve your sales team’s performance.

Provide the right sales tools

Repetitive tasks take too much time. T make your teamwork more effective, you should choose the right sales tools that can improve their productivity and help them automate some processes.

The best thing that you can do for your team is finding the right CRM platform that can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on time-consuming and repetitive tasks. One of such tools is Nimble CRM: a powerful CRM platform that can automate a variety of processes and help your sales reps sell more.

Incorporate one-on-one coaching

When you keep coaching your reps, the results will definitely be much better. Keeping an eye on the latest achievements in this niche offers a variety of advantages. You probably know that the area of sales is constantly evolving. So you need to make sure that your sales team is up-to-date with the current trends. You should always stay informed on the latest achievements in this niche and organize coaching sessions for your sales team.

Improve your team communication

If you want your sales team to be more effective, you should always find the time to talk to each member of your team. You need to keep track of how they are performing. It goes without saying that a face-to-face meeting with each sales rep can help them perform much better. Moreover, it’s a superb opportunity to find out where there is room for improvement.

Always involve your sales team in the company’s vision

Motivation is a crucially important factor that can help your sales reps be more effective. Each member of your team should feel significant. You should show that each sales rep plays an important role in the company’s success. Let them know that all of them are directly responsible for the success of the whole team.

To achieve that goal, organize team-building meetings where each of them can get acquainted with each other and you’ll be able to get to know them better. As a result, you’ll easily find out how to improve the performance of your sales team members.

Find and hire the right people

The best step you can take to boost sales is to hire the right people. Make sure you are dealing with true professionals in this niche. Your HR manager should be very demanding about choosing experts. A professional sales rep is an optimistic, competitive and creative person with a strong need for achievement.

Set specific goals – break objectives down into smaller, achievable tasks

Setting the right goals is the main formula for success. When you use the right CRM tool, it will be easier to measure the activity of your team against the goals. You’ll see detailed stats that show the performance of each salesperson for the chosen metrics.

Moreover, when you create structured goals and track the progress, you’ll make your sales team more motivated. You should regularly meet your company’s leaders to make sure they know their goals and are doing their best to achieve them.

Teach your sales team to sell to customer needs and how to be customer-centric

Your goal is to implement a customer-centric strategy – the most effective sales strategy that puts the needs of your clients at the center of the whole buying process. When you are a client-focused company, you’ll definitely gain customer loyalty, boost sales, and increase your referrals.

When coaching, address key performance indicators

Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) are a must-have tool that allows the sales team to monitor and evaluate the progress. Simply put, KPIs allow you to focus on key activities that are very important for your business.

To define the right KPIs that will definitely resonate with your business, use the following tips:

• Define what results you expect;
• Focus on quantitative measurements;
• Never measure more than 10 KPIs;
• Always measure KPIs every month or even every week;

Be a leader, not a micromanager

You need to be a leader for your team, not a friend or a micromanager. A good leader can inspire the employees and has faith in them. Leadership styles are numerous, but truly effective managers understand how to strike a good balance between managing employees, the network, and themselves.

Work on creating a culture of high performance

Company culture is a very broad term; it is not about offering different perks to every team member. It is the set of behaviors that can determine how everything is done at your company. Your goal is to create a high-performance culture that can help your company achieve the best possible goals. The main goal of a high-performance culture is to help a company achieve much better financial and nonfinancial goals.

To create a high-performance company culture you need to create impactful employee surveys, always gather constructive feedback from employees and empower the company leaders to embody company qualities and values.

Create daily goals

When working on improving sales team performance, you should set daily goals. By doing so, it will be easier to achieve monthly sales goals. For example, if a sales rep knows how many sales should be closed per day, they won’t procrastinate and will concentrate on achieving these goals.

Track and measure sales activities

How to measure sales team performance? What should you do to measure sales activities? First, you need to know where you stand. To find this information, you need to use certain metrics for field sales managers that will show what activities your sales team spend the majority of their time on.

They are as follows:

• Conversion rates;
• Average sales (per hour);
• Actual sales vs forecasted.

Create an effective onboarding & training plan

Almost all companies have training programs for new hires, but the majority of them lack ongoing training. Ongoing training is crucially important for your business. When you help your team develop the right skills that will help increase sales productivity, your company will definitely benefit. So keep track of the latest achievements in the area of online sales and always train your sales reps. Develop the right action plan to improve sales performance!

How to Measure Sales Team Performance?

You probably know that your sales team is the link between your clients and your product. Therefore, you should do your best to track their performance. But what sales team performance metrics should be taken into consideration? So get comfortable and have a look:

• Sales cycle length. You should monitor how long it takes to close a deal. It goes without saying that a shorter sales cycle means more time for other sales. So it should be as short as possible.
• Opportunity win rate. Thanks to this metric, you’ll be able to monitor how many opportunities end as a sale.
• The volume of sales by location. Check what location you have more sales in. 
• The volume of sales by product line. Thanks to this metric, you’ll be able to check what products sell best of all.
• Product performance. 
• Quote to close ratio (the number of quotes delivered compared to the number of closed deals). Thanks to this ratio, you’ll easily identify whether you target the right people.

When it comes to performance management for sales team, you need to consider a variety of aspects. However, it is impossible to do this manually. Today, your sales team can’t be effective if you don’t use the right software. In such a scenario, your must-have tool is Nimble CRM – the best and the most effective CRM tool that allows you to have everything at hand.

It is one of the easiest ways to control customer relationships. With this tool, you’ll have an extensive set of features that will help you build relationships with your clients and reach your daily and monthly goals.

Here’s the list of the main options that are offered by this powerful tool:

• Unify your contact data. You’ll be able to easily combine contact data, communications, calendar appointments with more than 160 apps.
• You’ll be able to easily locate contact information and get a 360-degree view of your leads. You can easily add notes to your records and access social handles.
• Nimble allows you to always stay organized. You can subdivide your contacts into lists and group emails according to your needs.
• With a Stay in Touch Reminder, you’ll never forget about anything.
• All your teams’ tasks, events, and calls will be properly organized.

Simply put, with Nimble CRM, you’ll be prepared to face absolutely everything! By the way, there’s a free 14-day trial version that allows you to test its superb features for free! To get started, you just need to create a free account, and you’ll have access to all its functionality.

All in all, it is impossible to run a company and improve sales team performance without a good CRM tool that serves as a tracker for your business. So make the right decision when choosing your CRM and always be at the peak of success!