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Sales managers play a key role in influencing and empowering their sales teams to accomplish greater levels of success. To build a great sales team, you must have excellent sales management.
As a sales manager, here are the top five sales management techniques that can help your sales team get above-average results and make your organisation succeed.
1. Hire Top-Tier Candidates
A captain is only as good as his team. This holds true for a sales manager. To succeed as a leader, you need a great team.
Since a great team is built of top-tier candidates, you will need to find, recruit, and retain the best sales professionals. Not sure what to look for in your prospective candidates? They should have skills that align with the goals pursued by your team and organisation. Additionally, they should be a good cultural addition to the organisation.
Finding top talent will require a significant investment in terms of time and effort. If you believe the search and recruitment part is tough to manage in-house, you can always engage the services of a headhunting firm to meet your talent acquisition needs.
2. Make Everyone Accountable
You need to define the rules clearly and treat every team member equally. Whether you are critiquing, giving feedback, or praising, every member needs to be held to the same standards, regardless of whether the person is a new hire or a seasoned employee.
Your sales team reps should know and understand the rules that apply to them and act accordingly. Bias in dealing with team members could adversely affect the team’s performance and morale, which would ultimately keep you away from attaining the goals you are chasing as the sales leader.
By making everyone accountable and held to the same rules and standards, you will treat your sales reps equally and give them the respect, trust, and leadership they require for optimal performance.
3. Encourage and Support Continued Learning and Training
Sales managers should invest in the growth and development of their people. Whether it’s one-on-one coaching or mentoring, or ongoing training and skill development, empowering your sales reps with the skills needed to succeed in their roles is important.
Such ongoing learning and development programs give the best results when they are held regularly and customised to the team as well as the individual members to address their particular skills gap.
These programs can also help your sales reps formulate and execute strategies while using the available technology, tools, and techniques effectively.
4. Help Your Team Leverage Technology and Tools
According to the State of Sales Report by Salesforce, sales teams utilise an average of 10 tools to close deals. This is expensive and inefficient. The use of too many tools makes 66% of sales reps overwhelmed, found the report.
As several sales enablement tools are available today, it’s your responsibility as a sales leader to help your sales team use the most effective ones for their tasks. From CRM systems and sales reporting/analytics to sales forecasting, and more, there are a lot of tools (and modern technologies like AI) that can work well with the systems your team has already set in place.
You can ask your team members to share their feedback on the tools and technologies used at present and inputs regarding what others can be added to the mix that they think could help them do their jobs better. The key is to stay updated on the latest developments to ensure your team leverages the most apt technologies and tools to be as efficient and productive as possible.
5. Provide Constructive Feedback
Sales professionals are a distinctive breed. Your team members will have diverse personalities, coaching/training preferences, and learning styles. Again, while some of them will be extremely competitive and high performers, others may be above average or mavericks.
Since you will need these different people to work together, your feedback to them should aim at minimising conflict, maximising performance, and using the success of one to motivate others.
By offering constructive, real-time feedback, you can help your sales reps maintain flexibility and fine-tune their strategies and course of action as quickly as needed, which is vital in dynamic sales environments. You may even mould your feedback to reward, motivate, or leverage the specific skills of your reps to ensure that competitive individuals perform optimally.
Final Words
To become a great sales leader, you don’t necessarily have to do great things yourself. Rather, you will have to get your people to do great things to push the organisation forward.
To accomplish this, sales management techniques like hiring top talent, making everyone accountable, organising ongoing learning and development programs, helping your people leverage modern technology and tools, and offering real-time feedback are vital.
If finding top-tier salespeople or sales leaders is a problem your business wants to overcome, let our team at InHunt World help you with your talent acquisition needs!
This article was written by Sonali