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Did you know?
- More than 50% of salespeople believe getting in front of prospects today is more difficult than it was 5 years ago.
- Response times are crucial to seal the deal as 35% to 50% of sales go to the company that responds first.
- After a prospect’s form submission, just 7% of companies respond within 5 minutes while 50% don’t take any action until 5 business days later.
The world of sales is driven by data and speed. Since your business growth and success depends heavily on sales, you might be wondering how to build a high-performance sales team. But what exactly are those sales team performance metrics that can make it a winning team for your business?
When you talk about productivity in sales, you are referring to generating the most sales possible in terms of both revenue and customer conversion, while using the available resources (people, time, etc.) optimally. Some key sales team performance metrics that highly productive teams monitor are
- Total Revenue
- Net Revenue Retention
- Average Customer Lifetime Value
- Repeat Customer Rate
- Conversion Rate (of Leads into Customers)
- Sales Cycle Length
- Market Penetration Rate
- Average Annual Contract Value
- Year-Over-Year Growth
- Win Rate of the Sales Team
Without a productive sales team, your business is likely to suffer sales shortcomings, which can cause sales pipeline monitoring issues, poor sales implementation, and ultimately, revenue leakage. This makes it crucial to boost your sales team’s performance if you plan to have more engaged and productive sales employees who can help fuel your business growth and expansion plans.
What’s the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance?
According to the Pareto Principle (also called the 80/20 rule), 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers and 80% of your sales will be the result of the efforts of 20% of your sales force. Not sure how it can help boost your sales team’s performance?
In accordance with the Pareto Principle, you need to
- Identify your top 20% of customers and focus your marketing efforts on bringing in customers with a similar profile
- Trim your sales team to make it lean and agile by retaining those most effective 20 percenters
- Optimise your time management by ensuring 80% of your time that’s spent with 20% of your people includes the most productive ones from your sales team
How to Improve Your Sales Team Performance?
Want to know how to build a high-performance sales team? Here are 5 tips that can help you to improve your sales team’s performance.
1. Have a Well-Planned Sales Employee Onboarding Program
Since your sales team’s productivity starts the day your salespeople join your company, it’s important to have a well-planned onboarding process that gets them up to speed fast. From orientation of the new sales reps to introducing them to your company and clients and what’s expected of them (in terms of their job profile), and proper training, a successful onboarding program has them all.
Continuous training (even after onboarding) and knowledge transfer (from experienced salespeople to their newer counterparts) are vital to helping the new joinees of the sales team succeed in their early stages rather than starting from scratch and fumbling their way through.
2. Invest in the Right Sales Tools
Sales tools refer to various technologies that make sales professionals work easier and faster. Be it CRM (customer relationship management) software, technologies that help in sales intelligence, or prospecting, and acceleration, there’s a wide variety to take your pick from. You can also encourage the use of data connector and integration tools, sales analytics software, e-signature and document tracking software, tools to automate repetitive admin work, and sales productivity tools to improve performance.
Whether your sales team wants to find and entice the business’s top 20% customers, manage the time spent on sales activities better, or help the team’s most effective 20 percenters work optimally (according to the 80/20 rule), they can get help from the sales tools provided they select the best-fit ones for the purpose.
3. Assess Sales Activities, Outcomes, and Important Metrics
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. To improve the productivity of your sales team, frequent and periodic evaluation of sales activities, outcomes, and critical metrics are vital. Monitoring sales indicators and KPIs will let you identify key factors like
- top-performing salespeople on the team
- the most productive sales techniques
- the most successful products
- the most efficient method to reach customers
In every sales meeting, it’s crucial to assess the goals set and progress toward achieving those goals while making adjustments where necessary.
4. Make Your Sales Team Well-Versed with the Product
One of the most important characteristics of high-performing sales teams is their expertise in the product. If your sales reps are well-versed with the product, they will be able to respond to any queries, confidently talk about the product’s benefits and how they address the customers’ pain points, and even tailor their responses to what their prospects are looking for.
By making your sales team experts on the product using training, case studies, trials, etc., you can give them all the ammunition they need to build their prospect’s trust and impress them enough to convert leads into sales.
5. Engage with Your Sales Team Extensively and Motivate Continuously
How motivated your sales team is and how engaged the team members are in their work are intertwined. While disengaged and demotivated sales reps will have below-average productivity, their motivated and engaged counterparts will meet and even exceed your expectations in terms of productivity. Not sure how to keep your sales force motivated and engaged?
Though periodic in-person interactions help a lot, you can also implement other effective steps. These may include encouraging healthy competition in the team, acknowledging the hard work of your salespeople, giving public recognition to the team’s top performers, highlighting success stories in the company’s newsletter or on the website, improving the pay structure, or even simply delivering words of encouragement.
Final Words
High-performing sales teams don’t build by themselves. A lot of planning and effort goes into creating them. If you have been looking to find an answer to how to improve your sales team’s performance, the above tips can help you to do it.
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This article was written by Sonali