How to Improve Sales Performance
In all organisations, Sales Performance is key to success. It is vital to measure it effectively to ensure that your team is hitting the expected targets/goals. Keeping track of both team and individual performance helps you assess what may need improving. Once we have this information, we can then apply new processes to help keep us on track.
Here are 10 ways to Improve Sales Performance within your company:
1. Provide Your Team with up-to-date Sales Training
Just because a salesperson has training when they started, doesn’t mean that’s it! Sales move quickly and all salespeople need to keep up to date with new processes and trends. Consistent training to work on your employees’ skills and teach them new sales strategies is a great way of improving both their and the team’s performance. With customer behaviour changing rapidly, sticking to just one plan (often for 20 years ago!) won’t cut it. Instead, make sure you are constantly researching both your industry and sales trends and make each employee aware of these techniques and demonstrate how to use them effectively.
2. Provide Ongoing Coaching
Training alone won’t work – its needs to be embedded with regular sales coaching. Ongoing coaching is just as important in the workplace as it is on a sports team! Using coaching on a day/weekly basis is essential to succeed and hit sales targets. Make sure to be giving employees regular feedback, so they know what they are doing well and things they can improve on. This can be done by scheduling one-to-one sessions to go over progression. Group feedback sessions are also a great coaching technique as it encourages employees to learn from each other and gain more knowledge. Another way of coaching could be to let them know you are there to support each individual if they need help or guidance. Rather than throwing tasks at them, encouraging employees to seek advice would be great for improving sales performance, as they will actively seek solutions to their problems to help them succeed and chase their goals.
3. Find a Good CRM System and Use It!
Managing leads and contacts using a CRM System (Customer Relationship System) is a great way of monitoring your sales performance through your current process. To make sure your sales are improving, organisation is key. Using CRM will help store all the important information in one place, such as leads, pipeline, deals and opportunities, and helps you see exactly what is working, and what needs to be addressed. Once you have a system that works for your business, check your analytics to be sure they are correctly corresponding with your current sales plan, and review your performance efficiently through this.
4. Provide Quality Data for Leads
Having quality data can be extremely useful to your business and sales team, as it allows you to use accurate information to understand your existing customers and target new leads by looking into online behaviours to create opportunities. If you do not use quality data you will be missing out on prospects and it can even damage your brand. Quality data ensures accuracy, efficiency, and productivity in your business, which will create a huge improvement in sales performance.
5. Introduce Value-Added Selling – Ditch the Pitch!
Understanding how you can add value to your customers is step one to improve sales performance. The five characteristics clients tend to look for are honesty, empathy, initiative, knowledge, and trust. By using ‘value selling’ you will need to ditch the pitch and understand each individual customer’s needs rather than just negotiating prices. This will show you are considering value add, and not just trying to sell to them, therefore will be seen as trustworthy, which will improve sales.
6. Ask Your Clients for Referrals
Another way to improve sales performance which is often overlooked is asking your current customers for referrals! Rather than spending all your time looking for completely new leads, why not reach out to your existing clients? Doing so not only increases your chance of gaining more sales but also is an effective way to gain quality leads using ‘social proof.’ An introduction from a known source will make them more likely to make the change to your company, as they will trust the existing customer’s opinions over hearing about it from a stranger. If you are interested in using client referrals in your sales strategy, making sure you have an organised process to do so, is very important. Figure out which way you would reach out to gain referrals, this could be through phone calls, emails, direct messages, and choose the correct people who would be happy to pass your name along. Will you add them to your website, proposals or use an online system such as google reviews. Make sure you are also tracking your efforts to see which way is working best, and always follow up!
7. Provide Testimonials and Case Studies
Testimonials and case studies are big factors to improve your sales performance. With case studies, your business can show factual statistics on how well you manage your services and overcome problems. Showcasing experiences clients have previously had with your business as well as showing how your product helped them achieve their main goal, becomes very effective for future sales. Customers are more likely to proceed with you if they find genuine opinions from other buyers who have had positive experiences and problems solved.
8. Hold Regular Team Sales Meetings
Another great way of improving sales performance is to hold weekly meetings to go over set targets and generate new ideas. This will keep your team focused on their goals, as well as bring forward ideas they may think are better for the business.
Holding a team meeting, to go over new opportunities as a group, inform employees of important changes or information, as well as make the team aware of new sales strategies to use will keep everyone up to date and mindful of the overall weekly targets.
9. Work with Marketing – Not Against Them
Sales representatives and marketers both have very important roles when it comes to sales performance, however, many companies have them working separately when they should be working together! Salespeople are more likely to gain personal information about a customer such as their objectives and needs of what they are looking for. On the other hand, marketers are going to have the data and information ready on what content and products are gaining the most attention and what customers are responding to the most. Having both sides working together and creating a process that can ensure everyone is working towards the same goal will bring in many more leads and potential clients.
10. Have a Great Reward System In-Place – Link Performance to It
Whilst working in sales, it is extremely important to have a plan to ensure staff are always motivated and fully engaged with their work. Many employers offer a ‘sales incentive’ which is a system of rewards given to those who have successfully performed well against targets. Having a rewards system for your employees not only will boost sales performance but will also mean they will likely create a stronger plan to be sure they succeed in their goals. It creates excitement and motivation in their roles and will encourage them to keep putting their best efforts into the tasks they are given. Also make sure sales targets are linked to the performance management system, so that doing well correlates to annual pay rises.
If you are interested in management training or comprehensive sales training, contact Sales Training International on +44 (0) 1704 889325 or email info@salestrainingint.com for more information.
