Creating a High Performance Sales Team

MATT JEFFERSON explains your crucial first steps to creating a high performance sales team

So, you have just started a new role as a sales manager or inherited a sales team – what do you do? First, start with the “who” – the people, then the “how” – the sales process, and finally the “why” – the metrics and targets they and you will be measured by.

THE WHO Like anything in life you need to sit down with each of your team and understand why they are here, what their journey has been to this point, and what their destination or end goal is. Are they career sales professionals, in which case this might be a step up within the organisation, or possibly one step in a sales career that may in fact inevitably end somewhere else? Alternatively, have they been thrust in to a sales role from a technical or product background and moved to what we in sales jokingly refer to as the dark side? I do come across the latter scenario quite often and find that there really hasn’t been much sales training or coaching and sometimes little management support.

Importantly, what motivates them – money, status, job satisfaction, recognition? You’d expect money to be the biggest motivator, but that isn’t always the case. I have had success by taking a financial value and matching it to what different team members are interested in: one might like motorsports but want someone else to organise a track day; another might enjoy European city breaks; and some do just want hard cash.

In my experience, adequate recognition has always been a significant factor, as salespeople are usually working longer hours than many other employees and are under more pressure from the business and the CEO. They are also easiest to measure in terms of performance – the numbers don’t lie, so when they are doing well recognition is essential.

Think about their role – what do they enjoy and what do they dislike? What do they do well, 50%

OF SALES GO

TO THE FIRST SALESPERSON TO

CONTACT THE and where can they improve? Yes, I

PROSPECT can hear all of you say, sales admin

SOURCE: INSIDESALES.COM and updating the CRM often comes top of the latter list. Reducing sales admin and increasing selling time is always a winner… time management is critical in most roles, but in sales even more so, as your buyers are only available during working hours, so an early bird really does catch the worm and starting the day without being prepared and without a plan is a disaster. What are their capabilities and do their roles match current skills and experience? Very often, there aren’t job or role descriptions or KPIs and so it may not be clear to them or to you what their role constitutes or what their responsibilities are. Developing a capability matrix can help here and may involve tweaking or refocusing current team members’ roles as the more specific and focused they are, the more measurable they are in terms of success. Continuous improvement is really important and where you have a team and strong players in certain areas of the sales process it works well to pair them up with others who are weak in these areas. The end result is that everyone improves. Your own ability at breaking the ice, building

trust and demonstrating integrity will be crucial in them opening up and being honest with you. If you are able to demonstrate some of your own background, challenges and even past vulnerabilities that will help in levelling the conversation. After all, we all make mistakes; the key is not repeating them.

Once you understand their roles, where they fit in the company, their motivations, and their strengths and weaknesses, this places you in a good position to understand the people aspect and how you can coach them to be the best.

THE HOW Next, look at the sales process. What does your team do, how does a lead come in to the business, how is it captured and nurtured, and what systems and processes are in place to turn that lead, if qualified, into a customer? Of course, if you don’t know what a good lead is, and by what criteria it should be qualified, then you need to take a step back and first build an ideal customer profile.

Sales process means analysing the sales lead workflow, marketing automation, CRM system, and data capture, and how the team prepares and researches for sales calls or meetings and the

MATT JEFFERSON is a Fellow of the ISMM, sales management consultant, interim sales director and business growth adviser. Visit: www.jeffersonsales.co.uk ever-important follow-up. The follow-up has to be timely and I usually insist that it is scheduled in the buyer’s calendar, otherwise it takes twice as long to gain that important feedback and also your time isn’t respected by the buyer.

Other key areas should include negotiation and close, pipeline management and forecasting.

If you ask a team member why a certain prospect is going to buy from you rather than from someone else, and you get a pregnant pause, this usually elicits a number of areas of weakness in the sales process that need to be strengthened immediately. I usually come across either overly optimistic or overly pessimistic salespeople, so the likelihood of winning ranges from 90% to 5% – and you need more precise forecasting than this.

Coaching all the team members across the sales process and refining their skills and ability in each area is essential to making them all high performers. There is a balance to be struck between coaching them and letting them make mistakes to see their errors – and you will find yourself having to step in from time to time to save the sale. Just don’t take the credit... THE WHY Last, reviewing the metrics and targets is key. These must be done together as each impacts on the other. If your metrics are wrong then you’ll never overachieve on your targets. By starting with the target, you can work back to what metrics to use and activities to conduct to hit it. If you know the average sales value and the conversion rates for each team member then you can quickly identify how many sales calls or meetings need to be performed to reach target and by when. This will, of course, differ across the team and you can identify strengths and weaknesses very clearly here. Also, by having data and metrics about your ideal customers and those that convert most you can focus on the right customer segments.

I would love to say that we always know these numbers, but unfortunately that isn’t the case, and sometimes you just have to use your experience from similar industries.

Asking when the targets were last hit is an essential question. There really is no point in having targets that no one can hit, as this simply creates a demotivated team with low morale, and if there are some good salespeople in that team they’ll soon go elsewhere, as no one wants to be at 50% of target all year. You need to look behind the numbers and truly understand what is realistic based on historical data, where your product/service sits in the market right now, and how you are going to drive more leads in to your sales funnel to hit that growth.