Element 2: Establish Performance Targets
Making It Work A sales team is very much like any type of team. Looking at it from the simplest point of view a team can be loosely defined as a number of individuals grouped together to work towards the achievement of a specific goal. This means that as a team leader, you will be working with other individuals in order to achieve a specific set of goals - and for a sales team this most often means meeting a sales target. The specific set of goals your sales team will be working towards are your objectives, or outcomes. This is the first stage of the process of building an effective sales team process. In order to determine what your team is attempting to solve you need to define and describe the sales situation in detail. In order for your objectives to be effective they must be:
Clear Clarity of expression is an important aspect of defining the outcomes of a group or team. In order for all members to be fully aware of what they are working towards, they need to understand the outcomes. Therefore you should ensure that the outcomes that you write are clear enough to allow for all members of the team to fully understand what is required. Try to avoid the use of overly complex terms and jargon. Attempt to write in plain English. You may also find it useful to include measurable terms in your outcomes. This assists you in being specific, rather than vague. Consider the following: “By the end of this year we must have more customers”. What does ‘more’ or ‘customers’ mean? Who are they? This is vague, and needs to be tightened up in order to be clearer. “By the end of this year, we will increase the number of customers placing orders of $50,000 or more by 25%”. This objective is much better, as it states specifically who is required to be able to meet the objective (all team members) and defines the customers and ‘more’ from the previous outcome.
Concise In many respects clarity of expression and being concise are intimately related. If you are concise, it goes that you are also being clear. Try to keep each outcome or objective to one or two sentences. If your objective is longer than this, re-read it to ensure that all the information in a specific outcome is required. You will often find when writing an objective that you repeat a single specific objective two or three times in different words. Being concise also assists the readability of anything that you write. Creating a list of long outcomes, which is two pages long, is less likely to be read than creating a short concise list of outcomes. Therefore, creating a shorter, more concise list is likely to lead to more effective meetings, as everyone will be more likely to read the outcomes.
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Trainer Manual BSBSLS501A Develop a Sales Plan © Precision Group (Australia) Pty Ltd