[Guest Post]
Does your team have the right motivation to improve its performance?
If your answer is “no,” then you aren’t alone.
Studies show that the majority of salespeople are faced with the challenges of reaching their intended quotas. Perhaps there are several reasons why your team is failing in its performance:
- They don’t have passion for their jobs
- They feel like they are lacking a mentor or a team leader who can guide them
- They lack proper training
- They don’t have prospecting skills
- They lack a proper drive
- They lack the appropriate understanding of your organization’s service and/or product.
There are countless reasons why you’re finding it hard to achieve your goals as a team. Not only does the failure frustrate you as a sales manager, but it can cause high chances of employee turnover. Ultimately, the situation can cost you and your organization huge sums of money.
Businesses would like to do without that kind of challenge. And that’s your responsibility as a sales manager to ensure problems attributed to the underperforming sales team are avoided.
Nevertheless, there is a lot to lead you and your group to success. Whereas you must comply with the company regulation and meet your quotas, there are enormous factors that go on behind the scenes. These are things to do with motivations, portraying leadership skills, and guiding your team members through their careers.
What are the training techniques sales managers should exercise?
Effective sales training techniques can span ways of creating sales plans to overcoming fears of rejection and exercising motivation among others.
The main objective is that all the components of sales training are helpful to the team and assists it to grow and develop so that no one feels like they are hitting a ceiling in their profession/career. If what you miss is the inspiration, what should be included in your training program, or you’re missing the appropriate facilitator, here are some of the seasoned sets of sales training techniques you should bring onboard:
1. Be a good listener
As Epictetus, the famous Greek philosopher once said, “You’ve two ears and one mouth – strive to use them proportionally,” effective listening is certainly the secret to effective sales. Rushing to explain the strengths of the item/service that you’re selling is an easy way of talking over your prospect.
But it’s one of the greatest mistakes that one can make – the moment the buyer feels you aren’t listening, they will leave you. Throughout the entire sales cycle, potential prospects may drop hints regarding your thinking, their feeling, or what problems they want to be solved. Answering these can build or ruin your sale. But you’re going to lose them if you aren’t a good listener.
You and your team must exercise the following listening techniques.
- Learn and practice active listening: it implies listening and understanding what your prospect wants and answering them with a summary of what they need.
- Mentally echoing what your prospect wants: don’t get overexcited before your prospect, listen to them very well, echo it in your mind, give them sufficient time to explain themselves, and respond once they have finished talking.
- Giving a summary of what your prospect has said: briefly repeat back what they have just said. This helps clarify any misunderstanding and is a powerful technique that shows your prospects you mind them and wand they need.
2. Think like a problem-solver
Conducting sales is much of problem-solving. You must exercise empathy, thick fast, act appropriately, and portray effective problem-solving skills among others.
Start with empathy, see your prospect and think about the world surrounding them. Listen to them and determine the problem they want to be solved. Finally, go beyond and determine another problem that they are unaware of. That way, you will catch their attention, solve their problem – by selling to them, and earn more confidence in yourself.
3. Craft scripts to emphasize the main objectives
A crafty salesperson is knowledgeable that gives them a solid foundation of working from – “knowledge is power.”
They use their sales training to get their team ready to diagnose common objectives that pop up with time. They collaboratively formulate scripts that assist them in dealing with these issues. Liken a sales team to a basket team.
A lot of time is spent learning how to dribble, defend, rebound, shoot et al. so that when game time comes, they’ll spend no time thinking about them; they’ve already adapted to doing them.
Similarly, the script will assist your team in getting past the main objective quickly and doing something else creative.
4. Learn red flags from bad customers
Beware, never waste your time chasing after the wrong prospects, they’ll directly affect you, affect your effort or even crush your business. A wrong customer can be more dreadful than a lost sale as they are bound to wasting your precious time, compelling for refunds, and/or generally bad-mouthing your efforts and business to other potential prospects.
The entire team must understand what they are looking for in a prospect to ensure that they are on the right track. Some of the common red flags include:
- Getting nasty: if you notice they have a bad attitude, be sure they aren’t going to change even after giving you the money. They may ask for a refund or confront you.
- Disrespectful: these kinds of prospects have no courtesy, they are too demanding, provocative, and interrupt unnecessarily.
5. Fundamentals of cold emailing
For salespersons using cold emails as an outreach to perform sales strategies, they require training on the various fundamentals of how to make a connection with prospects. Despite the destructors who talk ill about social selling, outreach over email is several times more effective at attracting new customers than social media – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. But you must cover several items to make your technique more effective:
- Learn how to compose your subject lines: do it like a human, don’t use slogans, do it in lowercase text, and add the name of the recipient where possible. Be brief – avoid spending much of their time going through your text. Make sure every sentence carries some sense and value to move them closer.
- Make the email stand out: try several tricks such as including some blog posts, video clips, and news. Bold or underline the most important information.
- Run email experiments: begin with what requires to be tested. Then examine a few experiments such as testing subject lines, modifying the “From Name”, et al.
6. Use technology
The majority of sales processes have become automated, thanks to ever-improving technology like Artificial Intelligence, making the whole process faster and easier for salespersons to accomplish.
The cloud-based CRM is a good example.
An effective CRM facilitates collaboration and removes the difficulty of staying in line with the calls and customers. Additionally, devices like smartphones and tablets enable the salespersons to multitask with little effort, enabling the customer meetings and calls to be well organized and documented.
The whole idea of incorporating technology into your sales team is to ensure the process progresses seamlessly. Always be vigilant and on the lookout for the most recent developments to make sure that the team is constantly productive and efficient.
7. Build a good culture
Besides being a necessity to the strength of a company, strong company culture plays a critical role in employee satisfaction. This implies that you should improve your organization’s culture and offer your team some values such as:
- Resilience: there can be flexibility in terms of scheduling, from areas of specialization to the organization of their office.
- Career development: this involves creating avenues for professional development and creating positions in your workforce that enable your team members to develop.
- Reputation: strive to be socially responsible within and outside the organization.
8. Streamline the sales process
It’s a fact; the whole sales process cannot be a one-size-fits-all, you should adopt a general sales process that offers your team members the necessary equipment needed to achieve the sales goals. A major way of creating an effective sales process is by developing playbooks.
What playbooks do is to take the entire process of the salespersons and share the tactics with any underperforming sales representatives. The result is a more effective, efficient, consistent, and ever-productive sales process.
Nevertheless, keep in mind that playbooks cannot accommodate all the situations, but they serve as a pliable guide that takes your team through the journey of buying and selling.
9. Inspire your team
Lead by example to inspire your sales reps. They will use the inspiration as their top management strategy. Show them how to become successful in their duties and motivate them to achieve the best results.
10. Build a winning team
Hire a strong team – self-driven people, earn their trust and exercise the best leadership skills to build a great team.
In conclusion, foster confidence and natural skills to provide reassurance to your sales reps. Couple them with education, field training to make them selling superstars.
About the Author
Rithesh Raghavan is the Director at Acodez, a Digital Agency. Having a rich experience of 15+ years in Digital Marketing, Rithesh loves to write up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development.
