Running a sales team is a bit like coaching a sports team. If you’re lucky, then you have a team of eager salespeople who are competitive and enjoy what they do.
Your job as a sales team manager is to bring out the best in your team, but your job is a bit more hands-on than other managerial positions. Salespeople look directly to their sales manager for positive energy, customer service tips, and help with other aspects of the sales process, and they also lean on you for encouragement on bad sales days. In other words, your team is counting on you to coach. These tips will help you to help them reach their full potential.
Drive home the importance of following best practices.
Sometimes it’s easy for professionals to forget their training and just operate off instinct, especially when they’re good at what they do. However, you need to make sure that your salespeople are following your company’s best practices to ensure their success and a positive customer experience.
To ensure that your employees are sticking to their scripts and following best practices, your call center quality assurance team needs to be proactive. Quality assurance is about much more than making sure that employee-customer interactions remain positive — call monitoring is only part of the job.
Your QA specialists are like the assistant coach to the sales manager, meaning you and they need to be on the same page. When your QA specialists hear or see something out of line with the established best practices, you have to be able to rely on them to handle the situation the way you would. In order for your salespeople to excel, they need their sales manager and quality assurance staff to help them make adjustments to their approach to get the best results.
Give them all the tools they need.
How would, you feel if you were given the task of painting an entire house but were only given a toothbrush to do the job with? Frustrated probably doesn’t begin to describe how you would feel. Well, you’re kind of doing that same thing to your sales team if you’re not providing them with the tools they need to succeed.
One of the most powerful tools you can provide your sales team with is customer relationship management (CRM) software. With CRM, your salespeople can get the drop on your customers before even speaking with them.
CRM is a comprehensive enterprise software application that allows customer service personnel and sales professionals to get to know customers by their shopping habits. CRM software can help you to determine what customers want and when they’re more likely to buy. CRM even keeps up with past support issues that customers have had. With so much insight into your customers’ habits and histories, your sales team members can approach them like friends rather than sales professionals.
Keep their heads in the game at all times.
Getting better at sales requires more than just showing up to work every day and doing your best. If your salespeople want to improve their performance, then they’ll have to do some homework as well — homework is kind of like the practice between games.
As the sales manager, it’s your duty to motivate your sales team to want to be better and then help them come up with ways to improve. The best thing you can do is help them to focus on their craft outside of work — the best salespeople eat, sleep, and breathe sales. Like athletes, true sales leaders are obsessed with their craft.
You also need to focus on ways to become a better sales manager. Just like a coach, you need to glean from other coaches and learn from their expertise so you can be a better coach for your salespeople.
Selling Power is an excellent tool for sales leaders and sales managers who want to get ahead of the game and bring their salespeople along with them. They offer strategies to make better salespeople and better sales leaders by bringing you stories, strategies, and solutions that are applicable to all salespeople. Be the example for your team and immerse yourself in sales culture so you can be better for them.
