Source: Unsplash | Austin Distel
Sales are at the heart of what most businesses do, and without a strong sales team, even the best products in the world won’t reach their intended market. But getting the most out of your sales team is a fine art, one that requires a mix of technological savvy, emotional intelligence, and people skills.
If you want to improve the overall performance of your sales team this year, here are a few things you can do to encourage more effective engagement, better use of leads, and a more collaborative approach to sales.
Invest in Lead Management Tools
Sales is all about reaching people, which is why most sales teams have access to a significant number of sales tools to help them generate leads and cultivate them effectively. Sorting leads and determining which are the most promising is time-consuming, and it is all too common for sales reps to spend precious calling time trying to decide which lead to contact next.
When it comes to making sales more streamlined, sales engagement platforms are one of the most effective ways to ensure your sales team can focus on what it does best: talking to potential customers.
Sales engagement platforms use a variety of different time-saving tools, such as queue-based lead routing, auto-dialing, and automatic email population to ensure that your sales reps are automatically being fed the best lead possible, which means they don’t have to spend a lot of time deciding who to call next.
If you think your sales team could benefit from a more streamlined approach to lead routing, you can learn more at VanillaSoft about the benefits of integrating a sales engagement platform into your operations.
Foster a More Collaborative Approach to Sales
There is a common misunderstanding in the world of sales that you can get the most out of your team by encouraging competition between sales reps. Films like Glengarry Glen Ross portray sales as a dog-eat-dog world in which every representative is fighting for their slice of the pie, and while this might make for good cinema, it’s a terrible way to run a sales team.
When reps compete against each other, they think about personal success first, and success of the firm second. But any experienced team manager or business owner knows that it is the bottom line of the company that matters most; incentivizing your staff to withhold valuable information from each other in the hopes that it will give them an edge is a poor way to encourage overall profits.
Instead, you should encourage your team to work together by sharing information and pooling talents to maximize the total number of sales. This will not only increase the likelihood of an increase in overall business, but it will also foster a more pleasant work environment, which makes employee retention much easier.
A well-functioning sales team is one of the biggest assets a business can have. Making sure that your team is operating at the highest possible efficiency means investing in the tools and training that will unlock your staff’s full potential.
If you believe your sales team isn’t performing as well as it could, upgrading to a sales engagement platform, and encouraging a more collaborative workplace are all proven methods for taking your sales team to the next level.
