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Typical Commission Structures for Sales Reps (with Pros, Cons & Examples)

Determining commission structures for sales reps is a critical piece to your sales plan. It sets the bar for the level of talent and skill set that you’ll attract to your sales team.

It seems simple, right? More money = better salespeople?

This isn’t always true. Higher earning potential through a commission time only comp plan won’t necessarily outweigh the risk a salesperson inherits by not having a guaranteed income source. Elite sales professionals expect to be paid a salary that they can rely on.

In short, a sales rep views their base pay as how they’ll be valued and treated by the company. Their salary is what they rely on to live.

What Is A Sales Commission Structure?

Sales commission is most commonly known as the variable component of a total sales compensation package. While an on-target earning (OTE) is almost always established, the total commission earned is dependent on each salesperson’s individual goals and their performance.

Your commission structure ties a sales rep’s performance to the amount of money he or she will take home each paycheck. It’s no secret that accountability produces results, and a well-structured commission plan is an excellent way to incentivize top performance.

So, while the salary component of a salesperson’s comp package is fixed and pretty easy to understand, the variable portion has a large amount of room for flexibility and configuration depending on the type of sale and sales process a company has in place.

Because there’s no one size fits all, sales compensation plans come in many shapes and sizes, including: salary/hourly + commission, commission-only, tiered commission, residual commission, and variable-rate commission. Of these, the easiest and most commonly used approach is to pay a certain percentage based on the revenue generated from a single sale. Very simply, a sales rep who closes a deal for $500 with a commission rate of 5% earns $25 per sale.

10 Questions To Determine The Best Commission Structure For Your Business

Determining the right commission plan for your business can be an extremely complex task that often overwhelms even the most experienced owners. To help guide you, answer the following questions before reviewing the various commission structures:

1. What are the company’s sales goals and sales budget?
2. How much should you pay and how much should they sell?
3. How long is the average sales cycle for your product or service?
4. Are you offering benefits, bonuses, or incentives of any kind?
5. Is this a fair structure that will motivate each salesperson to work hard?
6. What is the average revenue per sale (ARPS) or average price point?
7. What is the salesperson’s role: lead generator / canvasser or full-cycle?
8. Does the salesperson provide support and training to the customer post-sale?
9. Is it a one-time sale or is there typically repeat business and upsells?
10. Does the sales rep handle customer service / account management, or do you have a team?

Answering these questions will help you determine SMART sales goals, performance measures, and payout formulas. Doing so will allow you to more accurately judge how much you should be paying your team, and how your commission plan should be structured.

Good rule of thumb: The more time and energy required from the sales rep to provide service and complete the sale, the higher the commission rate should be in order to compensate their efforts.

5-Step Approach To Designing Your Commission Structure

By laying out detailed answers for the questions above, you’re ready to follow this simple 5-step approach that will guide you through the process of creating a fair – but effective – commission structure. A challenging, yet achievable, commission structure serves as motivation and inspiration for salespeople.

Remember that your commission structure extends well beyond just compensating your sales team for their work. Science has proven the best strategies to motivate sales reps. Compensation is an extrinsic motivation, and while it’s not enough on its own to keep salespeople hungry 24/7, a poorly structured commission structure can actually demotivate your foot soldiers.

Step 1: Know and understand profit and sales goals plus your sales expense budget

Prior to laying out your structure, you need to establish detailed figures as it relates to what your company needs to experience a return on sales revenue. There are 4 components involved in this process:

Determine Gross Sales Profit (GSP)
Calculate your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) Percentage of Sales Revenue (SR)
Calculate your Budgeted Sales Expense Percentage
Analyze your Sales Revenue Goal

Step 2: Consider & assess all job factors of each sales position

Any combination of things can influence your compensation plan during the design phase. While there may be too many to efficiently address each and every one, list and plan for as many as possible. Some of which include:

Local market conditions & what’s being offered for similar positions
Job expectations specific to your roles
Who’s responsible for generating leads – the sales rep or canvasser / lead generator
Amount of post-sale support expected from sales rep
Level of industry knowledge & experience required to be successful
Average sales cycle length & the number of opportunities that can be worked at one time
Basic or complex sales process

Step 3: Determine individual sales goals & fair compensation for all sales positions

Setting the standard for what your salespeople should be paid involves looking at more than just the work they put in. Start by establishing a benchmark for a sales rep who achieves their sales target in your market and industry. If you need help, reach out to people you know in this position or, if you’re part of an association within your industry, use them as a resource; they should be able to provide you with a considerable amount of relevant data.

After you’ve determined what your benchmark will be, then comes the fun part associated with creating a sales commission structure. Now is when you need to set individual goals. This is what each salesperson’s performance will be measured against.

You may be a rock-star, but don’t forget how difficult it is to find top performers. Set your standards based on above-average salespeople so that the target is challenging, but not on the level you expect of top performers.

Crunch the numbers to ensure you’re setting realistic quotas and not making it too easy or too hard. The graphic above shows that only 9% of the sales compensation expense was used out of the 15% allocated. The company now has 6% to use toward incentives, marketing, sales coaching or other resources to help the team reach their goals.

Step 4: Decide whether to blend salary, commission, and bonuses. Or use just one

Choosing whether to pay your sales team salary only, making them 100% commission-based, commission-only but with a draw, or any other combination is a difficult decision. It often feels like a balancing act between trying to put a plan in place that properly incentivizes while making sure the company is making its margins.

Below is a detailed outline for each structure. The most common methods being:

Commission Only
Salary / Hourly Only
Salary + Commission
Commission Only With A Draw
Tiered Commission Structure
Multipliers
Salary + Bonuses
Commission + Bonuses
Salary + Commission + Bonuses

Step 5: Consider offering other perks & benefits if funds permit

The phrase, “it’s the little things that often matter most” has never rang more true than it does as it relates to sales commission structure. Salespeople loving bragging about the perks they receive from their job. Whether it’s a cool office, providing breakfast every morning or covering expenses, these simple “extra” things go a long way.

You’ll be surprised by the positive comments you hear and boost in morale you see by offering certain perks in addition to your commission structure. A few items that go a long way in attracting and retaining top talent:

Car / Mileage Reimbursement
Cell Phone / Data Plan Reimbursement
Computer / Tablet & Data Service
Customer Entertainment Expense Account (can be controlled by requiring pre-approval)
Free Memberships (gym / social / recreational clubs)

Health Benefits & PTO

The Best Commission Structures For

Door to Door & Field Sales

The top commission structures for the door to door and field sales industries aren’t necessarily revolutionary, but each model has several variations. Some companies combine and blend the methods outlined below to create a more specific plan that better matches their process.

Determining a standard or uniformed commission rate for outside sales reps is particularly challenging due to the vast number of unique sales processes and commission structures that have been established.

The low end usually bottoms out at 5%, with some companies paying as much as 40 – 50% commission per sale. These are typically businesses that have implemented a commission-only structure.

Despite such a large range, the industry average usually tends to land between 20 – 30% of gross margins. It’s also sometimes broken down by gross sales with the industry average ranging from 7 – 15%. This translates to an average annual salary of $66,805 for outside sales reps. Indeed lists the average tenure for this position as 1 – 3 years.

Commission Only Structure: Pros & Cons

A commission only plan is the better of the two options if deciding between commission and salary or hourly only. A straight commission structure means a sales rep’s earnings will consist of entirely variable pay. It’s a rather risky option for some salespeople, especially those who are new. This is because there’s not a fixed salary component.

Paying hourly severely limits the company’s ability to get maximum productivity from their team. A commission only structure is typically used for 1099 sales reps (independent contractors). With this type of sales commission structure, the sales professional who thrive are those eager to hunt and close their own deals.

It can be pretty difficult for some individuals to determine what outside sales job will suit them best based on their experience, personality and selling ability. There’s not only risk for the sales rep in a commission only model, but for the company too.

A commission only plan is best suited for companies with shorter sales cycles and a considerable opportunity for sizable commission earnings.

Commission only plans are particularly popular because the sales rep doesn’t get paid if the company doesn’t’ get paid. Despite the challenges that could arise – like targeting the wrong prospects – straight commission is primarily used as a way to mitigate risk. But…

These plans do come with a rather large amount of risk for the rep. If they aren’t generating revenue for the company, they aren’t making money for themselves. This can lead to a large amount of turnover and unhappiness, casting a black cloud of negativity that destroys your company culture.

When implementing this model, recruit and hire the sales professionals who understand the difference between a sales job and sales career. They’ll have far more experience under this structure and understand what they’re walking into prior to joining your team.

Revenue Commission Structure

Revenue commission models are one of the most well-known and basic structures available to field sales organizations. This type of sales commission structure works best with products and services that have a set price point.

Example: If your company sells a service for $500 that has a commission rate of 10%, a sales rep would earn $50 each time they sell that service.

They’re also favorable for companies attempting to gain market share or enter a new market because they’re less likely to be focused on profit, and more concerned with achieving a larger business goal.

It should be noted that revenue commission plans typically fail to align with the larger, broader goals of a field sales organization or the unique DNA makeup of a sales team.

Gross Margin Commission Structure

Contrary to simply looking at the money coming in with each sale like in a revenue model, a gross margin commission structure includes the sale price and the costs associated with converting that sale. By taking both into consideration, the company arrives at the profit of each deal.

Example: If your company’s service costs $1,000 but accrues $500 in costs to complete that transaction, the sales rep would earn a percentage of the remaining $500 profit.

Those supporting a gross margin commission structure usually believe that all sales should benefit the company’s bottom line.

Draw Against Commission Structure

A draw against commission is excellent form of reassurance for your sales team. A draw is essentially a “guarantee” that a sales rep will make a predetermined amount of money each month for their efforts, regardless of their sales figures. Draws are best for new hires, ramp periods, long periods of change and uncertainty, and training.

Draws against commission are basically advanced payments to the sales rep. A rep who earns commission smaller than the draw amount keeps their commission, plus the difference between the total commission and the predetermined draw amount. There are a few variations to this structure, most notably, a “borrowed” draw that must be paid back according to the specified terms.

Example: A sales rep is eligible for a $2,000 draw in their first month and winds up taking home $1,000 in commission. The sales rep would then keep all of his or her commission in addition to $1,000 from the set draw allowance.

Tiered Commission Structure

A tiered model is a sales commission structure that is particularly popular among sales reps, especially those who are highly motivated or top performers. Sales people earn higher commission rates after closing a certain number of deals, or, surpassing a total amount of revenue generated.

Example: A sales rep earns 5% on all products sold up to $10,000 in total revenue generated. Under the tiered model, the same sales rep would now earn 8% on all revenue generated after surpassing the $10,000 mark.

This sales commission structure significantly motivates and incentivizes the top performers to continue selling. A tiered model provides salespeople with the freedom and flexibility to explore additional areas they may not have considered previously, like upsells and new product offerings.

Base Pay Rate Only

Base pay rate only is rarely used in today’s sales landscape for multiple reasons, one of which being its lack of incentives. Failing to properly incentivize results in an exceptionally low level of productivity due to a lack of motivation.

Example: Your company pays each sales rep an annual salary of $60,000. This translates to a weekly take home pay just over $1,150 (before taxes), regardless of performance level.

A base pay only structure is most often used by companies who operate almost exclusively on inbound leads. These businesses have a sales staff that is almost in more of a customer support role than they are a sales position.

The skill set required to succeed is fairly basic since the sales team works primarily on inbound leads. A base pay rate is most effective when your team is there to walk potential customers through the questions they have as opposed to overcoming objectives, for instance.

Base + Commission

If you want to attract the best salesmen and saleswomen, you’re going to have to pay for it. Like most things in life, you get what you pay for. Offering an hourly rate in addition to commission places responsibility on both parties, the company and the sales team. Both sides are making a commitment.

The company is committing a greater financial reward to the salesperson by paying them for their time in addition to what they sell. The sales rep is committing their full skill set and effort to working to earn that hourly rate or annual salary.

In this setup you’ll pay less per hour / base salary than you would if you were just paying an hourly / base rate. The same is true for the commission your organization will offer, but in total, there is much more upside for the sales rep. Commission should always be uncapped to properly incentivize the reps on your team.

The best sales reps in the industry are looking for companies who will invest in their success. One of the best ways to show that you have their best interests in mind is to measure the exact times they make the most money.

The key is having the data to back it up. In order to determine these types of advanced analytics, you have to stop being lazy and track every attempt they make. Tracking the outcome of every door your sales team knocks on will give you the metrics needed to determine when they’re having the most success, and ultimately making the most commission.

To determine the best sales commission structure for your business, it’s paramount to understand the importance of an efficient and effective sales process in the field sales industry. Fine-tuning your sales process will help you develop a sales commission structure that is beneficial to all parties.

>> Download Our Free Commission Calculator >>

commission calculator

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 sales enablement and territory management app to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity in just 2 weeks.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

3 Types of CRMs (and How to Use Them)

CRM Types

Whether you’re in sales, marketing or customer service, a CRM is critical to the success of your business. It acts as the internal system of record and single point of truth for the company.

Research by Salesforce shows that CRM applications can help increase sales by up to 29%, sales productivity by up to 34% and sales forecast accuracy by 42%.

A CRM lets you establish and cultivate long-term relationships with your customers so that you can increase revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

But which type of CRM do you need? Which is best for your business?

CRMs make up the largest software category – estimated to reach $35B by 2023 – with thousands of vendors catering to different industries, company sizes and sales team structures.

Across the categories, three main types of CRM emerge:

1. Operational
2. Analytical
3. Collaborative

So it’s important to know which type is best for your business.

In this article, you’ll discover more about each type of CRM, what each one offers, how you can use them in your business, and why they should not be viewed as a silver bullet.

What is a CRM?

A CRM – short for Customer Relationship Management – is a software solution that helps businesses to capture prospect and customer interactions in a single database.

In 2008, only 12% of businesses used a cloud-based CRM – this figure has now increased to 87%!

Research by Innoppl Technologies showed that 65% of sales reps who adopted a mobile CRM solution hit sales quota. Only 22% of reps using a CRM without the mobile functionality hit the same sales targets.

Teams can use the information in a CRM to send emails, make calls, add notes, schedule appointments, create reports, and manage sales pipelines from the CRM system. Any interactions from the customer are automatically added to their record, so everyone has the latest visibility.

Who Uses a CRM?

Sales teams can use a CRM to learn more about their prospects and customers, and manage their sales pipeline better. The CRM also helps automate day-to-day tasks, like scheduling follow-up calls at an agreed interval. And managers can track, view, and report on their team’s performance.

Editor’s note: Different sales team structures – inside vs outside vs channel – have very different needs and should not take the same approach to customer relationship management.

For example, a field sales CRM should look, feel and act a lot different than an inside sales CRM. The type of CRM should always match the business model. The risk is lower end-user adoption. In fact, over 90% of companies have a CRM adoption rate less than 40%. And the #1 reason for lack of CRM adoption – manual data entry.

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Marketing teams can use a CRM to target their ideal customer profiles (demographics, location, etc.) when planning campaigns. The CRM also measures the ROI on their marketing activities and campaigns so they can adjust accordingly in the future.

Customer service teams can use a CRM to help maintain and retain existing customers. The CRM database provides insights into a customer’s previous issues and interactions, so they can manage the current situation and plan future customer engagement activities.

The Core Benefits of a CRM

A CRM solution allows you to focus on selling and keeping your customers happy.

But there are other benefits, too, like enhancing customer relationships, reducing customer churn rate, increasing sales and revenue, and automating communication and tasks.

Let’s take a look:

Enhance customer relationships

Research by Software Advice shows that 74% of users said their CRM system gave them improved access to customer data.

A CRM captures every interaction along the customer journey (prospect to lead to customer) from multiple teams to create a 360 degree view of the customer. Using this information enables you to provide better customer service and communication across all departments.

Reduce data entry

A CRM reduces the mundane data entry tasks by automatically adding and updating customer records in the database. For example, when a potential customer visits your website or signs up for your mailing list, or when existing customers send an email, their information is automatically loaded into your CRM.

Improve communication

With every piece of customer information in one place, you can ensure everyone across the business is communicating the right message consistently.

Visualize pipelines

A CRM helps to visualize your sales pipelines so you can prioritize which deals to work on. By visualizing the pipeline, managers can create conversion percentage benchmarks and immediately see when deals are falling through the cracks.

Reduce churn rate

Research by Capterra shows that 47% of polled CRM users said their CRM had a significant impact on customer retention.

Using data from the CRM – e.g. user requirements, preferences, buying habits, etc. – you can customize and personalize your products and services to help reduce churn rate.

Increase revenue

Insights from a CRM help you identify your most profitable customers and build stronger relationships with them. This inside knowledge increases your sales revenue as you know the optimal time to target repeat business.

With a deep understanding of the ideal customer profile, you can create “lookalike” accounts when prospecting. For example, once you know who your most valuable clients are, and where they are located, you can formulate more targeted marketing and field sales campaigns.

Collaboration

Without a CRM, business functions often work in silos with separate pieces of customer data. A CRM shared across business functions means you can work together to achieve the same goals and objectives.

Editor’s note:

We’ve looked at the core benefits of a CRM solution, but the application and use cases will vary depending on the specific needs of the team using it.

In the next section, we’ll cover the 3 main types of CRM tools, and focus in on the sales team use cases for each different type.

3 Main Types of a CRM

There are three main types of CRM systems:

  • Operational
  • Analytical
  • Collaborative

Let’s take a look:

#1 – Operational CRM

An Operational CRM is the most common type of CRM and is used in many different industries.

This type of CRM is excellent for handling customer-facing communications and helping businesses manage their day-to-day sales, marketing, and customer service operations.

Sales automation

An Operational CRM can automate your sales process from lead generation to closing sale, as well as managing your sales force. For example:

Scheduling follow-up reminders to contact prospects at agreed intervals.
Tracking a contact and updating their status from prospect to qualified lead once they’ve completed certain actions or met specific criteria.
Reporting on sales team performance.

Field sales example:

SPOTIO’s CRM helps Field Sales Reps build and visualize their pipeline with its lead management module. Reps can filter leads, opportunities, and customers with colorized pins to visualize their pipeline:

Inside sales example:

Salesforce offers a variety of CRM categories, including Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and Sales Cloud with functionality best suited for larger inside sales teams.

Inside sales reps can use the Sales Cloud CRM to manage contacts, access sales enablement documents, track sales activity – leads, opportunities and closed deals – and take action from any location, on any device.

The CRM allows reps to spend more time selling to the right prospects, and do it with the best data at their fingertips.

Editor’s note: It’s important to remember that one size does not fit all.

For instance, an early stage inside sales software company should be using a different CRM than an enterprise outside sales team.

Similarly, many companies have both outside and inside sales teams. In this situation, it’s better to have one primary CRM and then “bolt-on” a mobile technology built specifically for the needs of the field sales teams.

For example, large enterprise sales teams often use Salesforce for its core internal sales activities and then bolt on SPOTIO for its field sales reps, as both tools work together seamlessly.

SPOTIO’s native 2-way integration with Salesforce makes it easy for reps to collect data and record notes in the field then sync it back into Salesforce in real-time.

See how Salient Medical Solutions bolted SPOTIO’s mobile CRM functionality on top of Salesforce and increased field sales productivity by over 15%.

Marketing automation

An Operational CRM also allows you to automate some of your marketing activities at various stages of the customer funnel. For example:

– Adding and tagging new email subscribers to your CRM automatically.
– Initiating a welcome email campaign whenever a new prospect enters the system.
– Identifying existing leads in your CRM for your next marketing campaign.

HubSpot allows you to automate your email campaigns using targeted workflows, and then personalize your emails for each recipient using specific details from your CRM:

Key Features

– Stores and organizes contact and lead information
– Streamlines daily business operations
– Automates some sales and marketing activities

You should consider an operational CRM if:

– You have a linear sales process
– You are a sales and marketing led business (new business focused)
– You lean towards workflow automation and prefer software to perform redundant administrative tasks

#2 – Analytical CRM

An Analytical CRM gathers, stores, and analyzes information about your customers. This typically includes customer data, marketing data, sales data, and service data.

Here’s how each of them dovetails together.

Customer data includes general details like location, age, gender, marital status, and income bracket. The more data you gather, the clearer picture you create; e.g. What does this person want? What are their buying habits? These reports help you plan your marketing campaigns.

The SPOTIO Lead Machine is a great time-saver when you want to generate qualified leads in a chosen territory. Using up-to-date customer profile data you can find prospects who are ready to buy in three quick steps:

1. Select your target area
2. Create your ideal customer profile (e.g. income, credit capacity, age of home, eco friendly, square footage, etc.)
3. Import your leads and start selling

Marketing data lets you measure the success of your campaigns. For example, you can generate reports to discover which leads convert the best and which campaigns yield the highest ROI.

Sales data, along with marketing and customer data, help you plan new campaigns, assign sales territories and track rep performance. Reports can help identify sales trends and patterns. So, for example, you can understand:

– Which products are your Top Sellers
– Which products sell least in Winter
– Which products sell most in Florida
– Which reps sell the most
– Which territories should be assigned to different reps

Service data helps with three core areas:

1. Customer service
2. Customer satisfaction
3. Employee performance

Customer service

Your staff has access to data in the CRM which includes buying habits and past purchases, so when they’re dealing with a customer, they can quickly check for up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.

Customer satisfaction

An analytical CRM system allows you to capture and address customer satisfaction issues early on. For example, if customers complain about the same thing; e.g. a software bug, you’ll be able to see the pattern and issue a quick fix to stop any further escalation.

Employee performance

As well as tracking customer complaints, an analytical CRM can also track how your employees are handling those complaints, plus other customer interactions in general. These reports help identify areas for improvement in performance reviews.

For example, SPOTIO gives managers a clear view of how the top sales reps are performing and also where leads are falling off in the sales process:

Historical data shows exactly what happened with every prospect up to the point of the last contact. The background knowledge saved within SPOTIO prepares the sales reps for their next customer meeting and helps sales managers coach their team to success:

Key Features

– Gathers, stores, and analyzes customer information from multiple teams.
– Helps organizations to plan sales and marketing campaigns.
– Tracks key performance indicators set by the business.

You should consider an analytical CRM if:

– You have account management driven sales process
– You have a finance led management style
– Your end-users are data driven and value metrics

#3 – Collaborative CRM

A Collaborative CRM – sometimes called a Strategic CRM – enables an organization to collect, organize, and share customer information across multiple teams. For example, sales and purchase history, customer service contact, marketing preferences, and technical support interaction.

When teams collaborate and share customer information, they can maximize profitability, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.   

There are two significant parts to a Collaborative CRM:

– Interaction management
– Channel management

Interaction management allows you to record and analyze every interaction a customer has with your company. Monitoring interactions helps you identify issues that an individual or groups of customers may be experiencing.

Channel management allows you to record the preferred method of communication for each of your customers. Some customers prefer text messages, others prefer a phone call, and some might prefer email. Either way, it’s better to contact your customers using their preferred method, so you get a positive response.

For example:

Imagine your company sells a mobile app. A Collaborative CRM would allow multiple teams to resolve issues reported by customers.  

The customer service team can get an overall view to see how many customers are experiencing the same problem with your app.

If it’s a widespread problem, they can alert the technical support team and request a quick fix to alleviate the situation. Then, when the fix is ready, the customer service team can contact each customer using their preferred communication channel to advise them of the next steps.

Furthermore, this information can be shared with the marketing team so they can tailor messages in the future.

The integrated e-Contract functionality in SPOTIO gives sales reps immediate access to office files and documents. Instead of emailing documents back and forth, customers can sign contracts on the spot:

Reps can also take pictures onsite as well as access files, such as product spec sheets, presentations, etc.

Key Features

– Collects, organizes, and shares customer data across multiple teams
– Improves the overall customer experience with unified messaging
– Increases customer satisfaction and loyalty

You should consider a collaborative CRM if:

– You have multiple stakeholders and departments moving in and out of the platform
– You have multiple locations or have a digitally driven company culture where most communication occurs online
– Your comfortable with customer data being easily accessible by most in the company

Accelerate Your Pipeline With Customer Relationship Management

So, what type of CRM does your business need?

Here’s a quick recap:

An Operational CRM is excellent for handling customer-facing communications as it helps businesses manage their daily sales, marketing, and customer service operations.

An Analytical CRM is best for getting an overall picture of your sales, marketing, and service performance as it gathers, stores, and analyzes customer information from multiple teams.

A Collaborative CRM is best for connecting multiple teams and improving customer loyalty, as it gives a 360-degree view of the customer journey from prospect to customer support.

All that said, a CRM is not a silver bullet. Rather it is a foundational cornerstone of your sales tech-stack, and companies that are achieving the most success – whether operational, analytical or collaborative – recognize this.

A CRM will only take your sales, marketing and customer support so far, and oftentimes you’ll need to purchase additional software to integrate with a CRM as your team evolves and business grows.

Outside sales teams looking for an all-in-one CRM solution that accommodates operational, analytical and collaborative use cases should try a demo of Spotio’s field sales CRM today!

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

Effective Sales Management begins with this….

Without sales, you don’t have a company. This makes the role of sales manager a crucial position with profound impact on the organization. Effective sales managers are not just knowledgeable about sales; they possess management skills and abilities that enable a sales team to continuously stretch beyond their current performance and achieve the next level of success.

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” — Lao Tzu

Effective salespeople must have two basic qualities: customer empathy and a drive to compete. On top of these important qualities, effective sales managers must also be skilled in attaining superior results through the performance of others by leading and setting up the individuals on the sales team for success.

A Sales Manager with an excellent sales record – but who does not lead and bring out the best in others – can break a dream team. It may seem like enough to assemble a group of talented sales performers that fit well within the organization, but even the best salespeople will leave the organization or fail without the strong presence and vision of an effective sales manager.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” — Proverbs

12 Core Strengths of a Highly Effective Sales Manager


Effective sales management begins with leadership. The best sales managers not only manage but lead with the following 12 core strengths of highly effective sales managers.

#1 | Set Goals and Expectations

Effective sales managers drive their teams to meet their sales goals with intense focus and urgency. These goals, coupled with clear deadlines, rewards and consequences establish expectations for the sales team. They must be set early and communicated clearly.

To be most effective, goals should follow SMART criteria:

#2 | Ability to Coach

Effective Sales Managers must be excellent coaches that look out for the performance of the team as a unit and the attainment of each individual salesperson’s full potential. Great sales managers consistently strive to build individual sales skills and team confidence by holding group and 1:1 coaching on an established cadence and as needed.

They should adapt their coaching to the occasion, recognizing that different people respond to different coaching styles. The best sales managers take time to make one-on-one time valuable, personal, and focused on the individual salesperson’s needs.

A committed coach also serves as a mentor. Personalized mentorship accelerates professional development; effective sales managers act as a mentor to support the current and future development of individual team members while supporting the strategic direction of the sales organization.

Not only do effective sales managers teach the ropes, they also provide the necessary tools to succeed. Sales managers must be experts on the company’s products, sales processes, and sales enablement tools.

The best sales managers feel comfortable with transferring this knowledge base and enable the team to go from good to great by making them confident problem solvers and decision makers.

Most importantly, the best sales managers provide frequent and relevant real-time feedback on their team members’ performance.

Being coach and being player are two very different roles, and effective sales managers must be prepared to transition from individual contributor to manager with all the responsibilities that leading a team entails.

Managers who suffer from the Star-Athlete Syndrome – who cannot adapt to the manager mentality – have a challenging time leading their sales teams even when they demonstrate genuine aspirations to do something greater for the team.

#3 | Manage Sales Performance

Effective sales management focuses on the underlying behaviors that drive sales results like account development, lead generation, qualifying opportunities, managing the pipeline and closing sales. Effective sales managers consistently measure the team’s performance by tracking metrics and paying attention to key indicators that serve as markers throughout the sales cycle. Keeping a watchful eye on sales performance alerts sales managers of any risks in meeting targets and allows time for remediation.

#4 | Create Accountability

Effective Sales Managers consistently measure performance against metrics and enforce the sales process to hold salespeople accountable for meeting targets. They avoid the micromanaging trap by cultivating a high-performance environment where peer pressure motivates salespeople to be better.

When salespeople exceed goals, they are intrinsically rewarded with praise and recognition. Those who don’t meet their goals celebrate on the sidelines eager to prove their value and redeem themselves. Accountability flows from the top down and the best sales managers hold themselves accountable for the success and failures of the team. After all, the success of the team defines the success of the manager.

#5 | Open Communication

Communication is a key function of a manager. Sales managers are tasked with communicating expectations, rewards and consequences along with all the other rules of the game. Effective managers take time to ensure every salesperson understands the metrics they are accountable for, along with the process and the tools they will use to attain them. They will foster an environment where feedback and ideas are expressed openly by the team in a dynamic flow.

The best sales managers communicate to inspire getting behind the team’s goals. Instead of using authority, they use motivation to command action.

#6 | Create a Positive Work Environment

Effective sales management begins with creating a positive work environment where salespeople know they are valued employees and their role is important to the organization. Sales managers set the tone and the code of conduct for the team and enable a healthy culture where everyone is happy to come to work.

The best sales managers invest in team unity to boost morale with team-building activities outside the office and other informal social events to prompt the team to get to know each other outside the pressures of the job. The more managers know about how each salesperson wants to be treated, the better they can cater to their unique development needs.

Team unity is also a product of success and failure. Success is memorable, and everyone likes to celebrate success. Effective sales managers reward success and celebrate immediately to create a continuous loop of motivation that reinforces the value of the sales team.

Managers also leverage disappointments to help the team grow and learn from mistakes and to find strength within the group to march on.

#7 | Streamline Processes

Effective sales managers stick to a standardized sales process that the sales team can count on for consistency and predictability. They define sales processes that are simple and flexible and can be used to monitor progress and enforce accountability. The best managers seek to streamline existing processes when opportunities for improvements are evident. They are receptive to automating tasks and redefining processes to eliminate activities that do not contribute to sales performance.

#8 | Manage by Leading

Effective sales managers lead their teams. They are superior confidence builders and exercise their influence to lift salespeople to a high level of sales performance. Studies demonstrate that effective sales managers directly affect each salesperson’s ability to reach high performance status and exceed their quotas.

Effective Sales leaders go beyond motivating and inspiring the team. They use accountability for targets, streamlined sales structures to nurture a high-performance sales culture, and provide the right tools to enable the sales process. Effective sales managers also focus the team on targets and eliminate conflicts of interest and other distractions that deter the selling function.

#9 | Leverage Sales Technology

Effective Sales Management embraces technology to streamline the sales process and monitor accountability. Great sales managers take the time to learn the tools in detail. They also have a keen eye to spot opportunities for automation and process improvement to help eliminate inefficient tasks that prevent a salesperson from being in front of the customer. They seek out digital solutions that help the team handle sales tasks more efficiently.

They maintain a flexible process structure and are agile to incorporate sensible technical solutions. For instance, good sales managers leverage cloud computing and mobile technology to allow secure remote access to CRM tools, relevant business intelligence and data that empower sales teams on the road and enable their sales organization to stay nimble and competitive.

#10 | Self Development

Effective sales managers lead their sales teams to keep their commitments and targets. In addition to overseeing the personal development of each team member, they also seek to improve their own performance as managers. The best sales managers take it upon themselves to always strive to be better sales leaders.

While organizations most often have formal development resources for managers, the impetus for self-development comes from within. Effective sales managers are willing to put in the extra work for self development to stay ahead of the curve.

Transparency is a concept that good sales managers tackle in their journey for self-development. It takes courage and confidence to display your team’s performance against goals for anyone in the organization to see. A transparent approach allows the team to be responsive, connected, competitive, and agile.

Effective sales managers set the stage for transparency and demand corresponding behaviors from their sales teams.

#11 | Ability to Hire Quality Talent

Effective sales managers take the responsibility for growing their sales teams. They dedicate substantial time to recruiting, hiring and onboarding new salespeople. They are constantly scouting for new talent and prefer to take their time hiring to ensure they have found the best person for the job.

When assessing talent, sales managers look for skills critical to the sales process as well as personality attributes that align well with the organization. Staying abreast of the talent market and building a pipeline of applicants, the best sales managers can quickly replace under-performers and continuously build the future success of the team.

#12 | Sales Expertise

Effective sales managers have the sales expertise required to help their teams master products, processes and tools. As experts in sales, great sales managers are able and willing to roll up their sleeves and participate in the sales process with tactical advice and support during sales meetings. They bring a wealth of practical experience to customer meetings and model top-tier behavior.

Effective sales managers are experts in sales pipeline management. While salespeople are generally focused on the task at hand, sales managers cast a wider net to ensure focus on deals in the present as well as deals in the future pipeline.

“A key differentiator of great sales leaders is their ability to dispense tactical sales advice and add value during customer meetings.” – Harvard Business Review

40 Character Traits That All Exception Leaders Have in Common

“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” —Jack Welch

As a bonus, here is a list of 40 desired character traits possessed by highly effective sales managers. Use this as a guide when you’re looking to hire a new sales manager or to evaluate your current leadership team to find opportunities to grow.

“In almost every survey conducted, honesty has been selected [as the desired trait] more often than any other leadership characteristic.”— James Kouzes and Barry Posner

An outstanding leader excels in:

Attitude
Boundaries
Boldness
Common Sense
Conflict Resolution
Confrontation
Cooperation
Correction
Dependability
Determination
Direction
Empathy
Enthusiasm
Ethics
Generosity
Goal Setting
Gratitude
Hard Work
Honesty
Humility
Influence
Inspiration
Investment
Listening
Loyalty
Morality
Motivation
Optimism
Ownership
Patience
Planning
Pressure
Productivity
Responsibility
Restraint
Self-Ambition
Self-Growth
Sound Mind
Temper
Tolerance

“It is possible to give away and become richer! It is possible to hold on too tightly and lose everything. Yes, the generous man shall be rich! By watering others, he waters himself.”
— Proverbs

Conclusion

Like any skill one acquires in life, effective sales management begins with an interest in practicing what you’ve learned until you get it right. Whether you’re a sales manager who wants to make an initial impact or a sales manager with tenure who strives to excel and attain mastery,  you can grow and develop quickly by identifying one or two areas to focus on and crafting a measurable plan for growth and improvement.

No leader is perfect, but the commitment to mastering these traits translates into a more productive, healthy, and profitable team culture.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration platform to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

 

Sales Contest That Keep The Whole Team Motivated

In a world where revenue is king, it’s natural to design your sales incentives programs to reward those with the highest sales. While this method make sense, it’s flawed. It keeps top performers motivated but doesn’t engage the rest of the team who can’t see themselves in that top spot.

Sales contests are a great way to motivate the whole team. Beyond rewarding sales and revenue, they offer the ability to reward many different types of increased action that align with your organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Rewarding different types of KPIs will increase rep confidence in their ability to compete and will allow them to reassess their potential impact on the outcome of the game.

This positive setting will lead to greater results in the contest and healthier competition that boosts the morale of the whole team and not just the usual top reps and reminds the team that there are many ways to make an impact. This is important because while sales reps are typically tracked and rewarded for their individual sales, the main goal of the sales team is to improve the sales for the entire organization.

Benefits of Sales Contests

By nature, humans are very competitive beings. It has come from millennia of competing for resources and status. For those two reasons we compete with each other on almost every level and in almost every way possible whether it has to do with school, sports, work, or even the greenness of your lawn. Competition gives people a sense of pride and purpose.

With that in mind, sales managers and leadership can capitalize on human tendency through sales competitions. The main goals of sales competitions should be to increase individual performance, elevate team activity, and boost overall morale.

Tips for Planning Sales Contests

The best way to get everyone excited about a new sales contest is to ensure that no individual has an upper hand from the start. In order for a sales competition to guarantee a level the playing field between top and bottom performing reps, implement rules or mechanisms of:

1. Chance

2. Measurement of activity

With mechanisms of chance, the winners of the sales games are less likely to always be dominated by top reps because their normal strategies of making sales become irrelevant. Along those same lines, the outcomes based on measurable amounts of activity also inhibits the top sellers from dominating the games if they are unwilling to put in the effort that the bottom reps are able and willing to do.

The reason for applying these two characteristics to the sales games is that it makes every rep equal from the start and encourages healthy competition. Let’s face it, nobody is thrilled to compete in or win a game when the outcome is practically predetermined.

25 Sales Contest Ideas to Motivate Your Team

Below you will find a list of 25 sales contest ideas managers can use to motivate reps and increase performance. You’ll see the goal for each one, as well as how they work.

1 | Daily Prize

It may seem that holding a daily contest makes the competition trivial because many of the prizes are small and not of great value. The key to this strategy is that it keeps the reps constantly engaged.

Since the prizes are given daily, the lead or sales tracker is reset each day so that there will be a wider range of possible winners.

Raffle tickets

2 | Raffle

A raffle is a good way to incentivize reps to achieve short-term goals while being able to win a larger and more lucrative prize. Raffle tickets are given to reps when they reach specific sales goals and the prize is generally only drawn after a long-term sales period has passed.

The secret to holding a good raffle is ensuring that every participant has a measurable and achievable goal that can earn them a chance to get a raffle ticket and enter the drawing.

3 | Customer Reviews

A customer review contest requires a little bit of front-end work from the standpoint that there needs to be an easy way for the reps to obtain a review whether it is good or bad. The easiest way to go about this is to set up a customer survey or take advantage of an already existing survey process.

A customer review contest requires a little bit of front-end work from the standpoint that there needs to be an easy way for the reps to obtain a review whether it is good or bad. The easiest way to go about this is to set up a customer survey or take advantage of an already existing survey process.

Besides receiving the always nice pat-on-the-back from a satisfied customer and the public recognition from upper management, this contest encourages reps to not just be good at selling a product but also be ready to get a review of their service for better or for worse.

4 | Salesperson of the Month

This one is a classic and is often ran as one. The winner is generally the sales rep with the most revenue in sales. But just because this contest carries the classic title doesn’t mean the item being measured has to be classic as well.

Get creative and aim for something unique such as the most individual sales, the most “Nos”, the most reviews good or bad, or the most helpful with coaching other sales reps. Either way you measure it and reward it, the winning sales rep will always enjoy having everyone else see their name and photo on the office wall for an entire month.

5 | Winner’s Choice

A winner’s choice is where the winner gets to decide what the prize will be for either themselves or the next month’s winner, with obvious monetary limits or choices set by management beforehand. It’s a simple way to not have to get too creative and the benefit is you’re less likely to have someone complain about the prize.

6 | I OWE U! (from the boss)

An I OWE U from a superior is always a fun sales contest and cause for excitement on the sales team. It’s best to set a structured timeline and goal well in advance. Since it will most likely be you or someone near you fulfilling the debt, it is best to make clear the prize or selection of prizes.

If you want to get a solid gauge as to what type of debt your sales reps are looking for, then have them submit their requests ahead of the contest and you can select one of the prizes as long as they are not too outrageous.

Common prizes for the winner may include eating/cooking lunch together, giving professional coaching sessions, washing and cleaning their car, or even more humorous things such as performing karaoke to their favorite song in front of the whole team.

7 | On a Boat (Boss for the day)

It is a pretty simple prize for whatever the contest may be. The winner gets to be boss for a day or some variation of it. You could let them take your position for the day, sit at your desk, pick the location for the next company lunch, or run a meeting. Either way the winner will be happy to hear all day long those two sweet words come out of your mouth, “Yes Boss!”.

8 | Sales Poker

This is another fun sales contest that requires each participant to acquire 5 cards out of a 52-card deck. Each card is earned by achieving an established goal. At the end of the sales period, the sales rep with the best hand wins the prize. It is an easy game that allows all participating sales reps a chance to win, even if they weren’t necessarily the best performing sales rep for that period.

9 | Lead Conversion

The premise of this sales competition is that leads are handed out randomly and evenly to the sales reps and the one person or group to convert the most leads into sales during a specific timeframe wins the prize. This sales game allows for a winner by chance since some reps might get more quality leads than others.

10 | The Whopper (or Top This)

What’s a whopper without its lettuce and tomato? The trick to winning this contest is to be the one to upsell the customer the most. The length of the sales period can vary and the prize along with it.

11 | Most Wanted

This is similar to the “Whopper” contest but differs in what types of leads are handed out. In this sales competition the manager identifies and hands out leads of the biggest leaders in the industry. No small fish here nor any random ones either. These leads are highly desirable targets and the sales rep or team that lands the biggest single sale wins.

12 | Upsell Contest

This sales game is designed to reward sales reps for upselling and increasing revenue from existing partners. Some options for measuring the upsell progress and determining a winner is to select either the largest upsell dollar amount earned, the largest upsell percentage earned relative to the client’s prior account history, or the highest amount of client’s that are upsold.

13 | Sales Bingo

Bingo is always a good time. Turn it into a sales contest by making the squares represent different sales goals. What makes this sales game fun is that it requires skill and luck. The skill to make the goal on each square and the luck to get them in the correct sequence.

14 | Most No’s (in a single week)

The Most No’s game is a fun and creative sales contest idea used to stir the sales team pot. The reason is because it seems so counterintuitive to be wanting more rejection. In reality, it drives an increase in sales activity and the likelihood of a rep getting a “Yes”.

The goal of the game is to see who can get the most No’s/rejections within a sales period whether it is a day, a week, or a month. Generally, the game shouldn’t last longer than a week since the longer the game continues, the less competitive it becomes. The gap between the lowest and the highest “No’s” counts gets wider.

15 | The Loser

It never pays to be the loser but sometimes the loser does pay. Simply put, the loser of the sales contest pays an amount towards a company party or something fun that in the end everyone will get to enjoy.

Be sure to make the amount somewhat insignificant, like $20, so that the loser won’t be too upset when they have to pay up. Some good ideas for where the money go are holiday parties, company picnics, team lunches, happy hour events, or even have a charity chosen by the team.

16 | Retention-Based Sales Contest

In most industries, the companies that are the most profitable aren’t usually making one-time sales but are instead focused on creating repeat sales with the same clients. Sales reps will often get focused on landing new clients instead of catering to the known clients that have already given them their business.

To create a more loyal client base, it’s recommended to have some sales contest ideas fixated on encouraging sales reps to garner loyal and repeat business. One way to do this is to hang up in the office a repeat business whiteboard. The goal of displaying their individual progress is to help them visualize their individual contribution to the company’s loyal client base.

17 | Enterprise-Level Sales Contests

Keep your team motivated and take away the focus on individual sales. Create a fun sales contest where offices compete against other offices or managers against managers. This is all about boosting team morale, creating a greater team cohesion and losing the emphasis on the individual.

A satisfying reward for the winning team or manager is often just bragging rights.

18 | Time-Reward Sales Contests

A high motivator and fun sales contest idea that gets the competitive juices flowing is a reward of time off. It suggested to use this reward near the end of a sales cycle because sales reps will sometimes hold off on making certain deals so when the next sales period starts, they have a deal ready to go in their pocket.

The rewards can range from leaving early on a Friday, arriving late on a low volume day, or even a paid time off (PTO) day.

19 | Buddy Up

Use the buddy system. Pair your top sales reps with the lower performers and reward the top sales team at the end of the month. The main result of this exercise will be greater team collaboration and the lower performers will have a chance to learn what makes their highly productive counterpart so effective.

20 | Pitch Contest

In this contest, top producers anonymously submit their sales pitch and the team tries to guess who’s each one is. At the end of all the submissions the whole team can vote on whose pitch they liked the most. All participants get to keep a copy of the pitches which they can learn from and use moving forward.

21 | Sales Team Scavenger Hunt

Frequently, a sales team has members that have become specialists in selling specific products or targeting certain clients. The scavenger hunt sales contest encourages your sales reps to team up and utilize their special talents to accomplish an objective.

The objectives can range from reaching a set revenue goal to selling a specific product to accomplishing a certain number of upsells. As the team members work together to fulfill their scavenger hunt objectives, they will naturally increase collaboration, boost morale, and drive sales.

22 | Surprise Salesperson Appreciation

Don’t let a team member go unnoticed even if they aren’t at the top of the charts. Choose a day when the entire team brings in a little gift or letter showing their appreciation for a chosen team member. Sales reps are notorious for being hyper-competitive and will often lose sight of keeping the overall morale high. Show every team member they are important to the success of the business and each other.

23 | Brackets

Much like college basketball’s March Madness, this sales game breaks the team into brackets. Each team member competes against a fellow sales rep and the one that out-sales the other during that week advances in the ranks.

As the weeks go on the competition gets more intense as the winning reps advance. At the end, the winning team member (and potentially the runner-up) gets a prize.

24 | Fantasy Sales Teams

Fantasy football teams have infiltrated the office water cooler, so why not take some of that competitive talk and let it infiltrate the sales team? Break your sales team up and simulate a random draft pick. Points are then awarded to each team’s “player”’ for their sales. The manager or team that earns the most fantasy points in the end wins the competition.

25 | Traveling Trophy (Floating Prize)

Each sales period the sales rep with the highest sales gets awarded a trophy to display on their desk. As long as they stay on top of their game, the trophy stays in their hands. When they are knocked off their highest sales pedestal, the winning rep takes the trophy and displays it at their desk.

As silly as it may seem, the flaunting of a decently sized gleaming trophy at a fellow team member’s desk can spark the competitive edge a manager is looking for in their team. Add a little more emphasis to the sales games and post pictures of each week’s winners in the breakroom.

Common sales contest mistakes to avoid when setting up your contest:

While running sales contests can definitely boost morale, they do come with a risk. Be sure to avoid these common mistakes which can cause the opposite of the intended effect.

1 | Your contest only motivates top salespeople and fails to reach your team as a whole.
2 | It fails to hold your employees’ interest after the first few days.
3 | Improvements in performance do not last once the contest is over.
4 | It creates a competitive environment that hurts collaboration and employee spirit.
5 | Scores are tedious and time-consuming to track.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales automation and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

Sales Technology: Cost or Investment?

Sales technology is vital to understanding the way that your company communicates with its customers and the areas where your teams perform their best. Without the metrics, projections and all-inclusive data-capturing from a good sales platform, every stage of business suffers. From lead nurturing to cold calling, information and communication statistics are critical to making data-driven decisions.

Implementing a SaaS platform to support sales can make or break a business, carrying benefits which far outweigh the cost of software and services. Here’s a closer look at how sales technology should be seen as an investment in the future of your business rather than an expense.

Tech Stack’s Many Financial Benefits

Every growing enterprise needs a flexible sales platform which empowers reps and managers with all the information that they need to optimize marketing and conversions. Integrating a trusted solution such as SPOTIO improves service delivery and internal organization within an enterprise on numerous levels.

One could summarize the key savings benefits of an investment in sales technology as:

Unified Communications – Lower Communications Costs
Enhanced Productivity – Increased Profitability
More Profitable Marketing Campaigns
Lowered Cost of Outside Sales
Zero Data Backup Expenditure
Reduced Training Expenses
Faster Onboarding
Lower Labor Costs

Yet, good sales technology brings so much more than a basic increase in revenues and these eight rewards. Let us take you through a concise but comprehensive look at exactly what you can expect in features and value when taking on the cost of new sales technology.

Free and Cheap Software vs Dedicated Sales Technology

Many enterprises start off from meagre roots and end up adopting sales and marketing software gradually. Resorting to freeware packages and low-cost sales solutions may appear to be enough to start with but businesses quickly learn that more powerful software is needed.

What begins as a few customizations perhaps with the help of a technically-minded colleague soon turns into countless support calls, more hours billed and a configuration which involves so many apps that staff struggle to navigate the system. Yet the frustration is but a hallmark of much larger problems that can occur.

Running multiple databases devoted to different departments of sales and marketing can lead to everything from accounting errors to outright corruption of your valuable data.

Implementing dedicated sales technology will let you manage your leads, opportunities, customers and staff from a singular interface and unified database. Offsite data backups alone cost a fortune. When you resort to a SaaS provider, you’re not only reaping the benefits of a comprehensive customer relationship management platform with sales assistance, but you’re also investing in a secure backup for your critical data at no extra cost.

Automation and Your Enterprise

Cutting-edge sales technology supplies a business with expansive automation technology which can handle everything from document management and service queues to email marketing and up-sales.

Investing in sales technology can be seen as an investment in automation rather than an expense. When one looks at automated emails alone, open rates at 70.5% higher and click-throughs are 152% more likely. The dedicated templates, marketing, and email automation delivered by good sales technology gives proven results which are hard to match by any other expenditure.

The best part is that the benefits are forever increasing as you and your staff learn to harness the full scope of your sales system. The best sales software will have a learning curve which makes it easy for staff to adapt.

For example, SPOTIO is so user friendly that your sales reps are up and running and fully familiar within just one to three days after implementation. Within the first week of implementation, your sales technology will be used for everything from accessing prospect data on the move to sharing a collaborative calendar with the rest of the workforce. Real-time chat with managers and other staff ensures that everyone is in the loop while workflow automation and advanced queue management keep all processes as efficient as possible. Even field agents will be able to fit more in their day with optimized route planning and time tracking.

The benefits of sales automation are all-encompassing and vastly offset the cost of software.

Sales Tech and Lead Nurturing

Another key benefit of sales technology is the way that it supports your sales and marketing teams at every step of the sales process. Lead nurturing is integral to increasing your sales and conversions. After all, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than prospects which have not undergone lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing is so much more than just a string of emails, transferring a clear idea of the buyer intent in an attempt to secure their business.

Good sales technology will give you intelligent reports which reveal the interests of prospective buyers and their behaviors, as well as logical groupings. With this leverage, your sales teams will begin to truly customize communication with leads and prospects. Managers are given a clear overview of the prospect as well as their place within the buying cycle. Good lead management is critical to success. Without this vantage, customizing emails and other marketing efforts is limited while estimations of any sales probability are nothing more than blind speculation.

Any lead nurturing campaign which hasn’t clearly identified a perspective to educate, individualize, and inform your prospect will most likely be time and money wasted.

Sales technology may require an initial expenditure, but complete profiles with a full buyer history and crystal-clear reports covering the whole sales cycle is invaluable.

HR, Team Optimization and Performance Metrics

When one compares the cost of sales technology to the cost of incorrectly placed sales reps, teams or managers, one will soon see just how valuable platform insights truly are.

Sales technology lets you keep track of individuals and sales teams.

With metrics and reporting available for activities and goals, you’ll always be able to shift your staff to the most productive place within the sales cycle. Certain reps will always be better at handling a particular demographic or a specific stage of your sales campaign. Businesses that forgo the cost of dedicated sales technology have no accurate way of assessing the performance of their teams, reps, and campaigns. One could see the minimal savings of going without sales software as money wasted rather than money saved.

Productivity is at the heart of profitability and without refining your management and internal optimization, a business is pouring valuable time and money into wasteful prospects and inefficient strategies. Efficient staff management which relies upon hard performance data brings improvement to the productivity of the entire workforce. With staff spending less time putting together information and formulating an approach, studies show that customer service labor costs drop by up to 40%.  

Enriching Online Content

Regardless of whether you’re utilizing field or outside sales, inside sales, or a combination of both, sales technology enables strategic management decisions and effective internal communication. The cost of sales technology is minimal when you consider that it supports remote sales, in-store sales, and it helps you enrich your online content. Sales is a segment of business which requires devoted resources in every industry. But the truth of the matter is that almost 80% of all buyers research your product and read reviews online creating a firm bias for their purchase before they interact with any member of your sales team.

The enriched reporting and data available concerning your buyer’s habits, preferences and the way that they interact with your website and online services is invaluable to any enterprise. Good software will give you the information needed to shape the best experience for your customers while delivering key insights as to how you need to improve your brand presence and marketing automation.

Website upgrades, feature improvements and extended functionality is wasted expenditure unless you have factual data indicating the efficacy of the upgrade. Leading platforms let you know exactly what needs to change to meet the needs of your customer. Field CRM software and current sales technology like SPOTIO makes your business more accessible online. It gives you the information that you need to customize the user-experience in the most lucrative ways to lead viable prospects to your sales teams.

Invest in Sales Software & Invest in Sales Prospects

Sales prospecting and the identification of potential new leads is the most challenging part of the sales process. Most salespeople find closing the next most difficult, followed by lead qualification itself. The sheer difficulty of assessing the viability of a new prospect has lowered over the years thanks to SaaS solutions.

When you give your staff the tools they need to successfully prospect a new sale or sales demographic, the challenge is transformed from a painstaking process into a profitable, exciting chase to exceed quota. Reaching out to leads in an effort to spark a conversation inspiring a sale is made much easier when you have access to a database which incorporates a full history of all prior customer communications, preferences and habits.

Profiling the most viable socio-economic demographic becomes a matter of analyzing hard facts, easy to read graphs, and in-depth comparative reports. 96% of all buyers will schedule a meeting5 with your staff if you focus exclusively upon the value delivered to them.

Sales technology lets you see where your customers perceive value in your product or service so that your teams know exactly how to formulate their approach.

Sales Technology and Effective Collaboration

The cost of sales technology can be equated to an investment in smart selling. There’s no better way to improve synergy between different sales teams. Cross-collaboration is up to 25% more productive on average while 73% of all sales teams find sales technology essential to collaboration across different departments of an enterprise.

Good sales software will not only streamline internal processes and personalize marketing and sales, but it will also facilitate clear communication across all channels and all departments. The vast majority of sales reps recognize that their capabilities to gain a single overview of all-important aspects of a customer is severely hindered without the aid of proven sales technology. Only 17% of all teams are happy with their unified customer profiles. The importance of aggregated data should never be underestimated.

Without efficiently integrated data from departments like marketing or service deployment, sales have a hard time delivering the best customer experience across the most effective channels. Inter-department communication puts the customer in the most capable hands at any point of your sales pipeline. Critical information arrives immediately which improves the favorable image of your company and frees up pressure on internal workflows. Siloed departmental systems are simply not efficient enough to give sales the edge that they need to stay competitive in today’s markets.

Forgo sales technology and you could be throwing away valuable customers, conversions, and sales.

The Importance of Proper Territory Management

Opting for a dedicated outside sales solution such as SPOTIO enables sales reps to optimize every area of business. From route optimization to territory management, SPOTIO B2B sales technology delivers an average efficiency increase of 46%. Territory and route management software supplies the insights needed to make informed decisions concerning your sales structure. It will increase sales within enterprises of all sizes and is near essential to large, complex organizations.

There are simply so many variables available to sales leaders when asked to improve performance and conversions that attempting to maximize returns without the help of dedicated software accrues a massive cost in time and manpower. Sales responsibilities need to be balanced across your enterprise. The correct customers need to be targeted by the right sales teams based on sales potential, geography, socio-demographic factors, performance history and current relevant statistics.

Sales technology gives your business the highest potential for securing a new opportunity by giving you all the tools you need to implement intelligent territory management. Mapping territories with the help of a dedicated platform is quick and easy. This means that your reps and managers will be equipped detailed profiles and maps filled with qualified prospects in just minutes.

What’s time worth to your business?

Saving Your Company Onboarding Costs

When you know your workload and the balance which your employees are currently maintaining, then you can onboard new reps more efficiently, skyrocketing the process of reaching full productivity.

Onboarding normally comes with a definite period of adjustment whereby new sales reps are learning customers and company protocol. Businesses which resort to a complex arrangement of individual software packages and pen-and-paper management solutions end up costing the company a significant tally of resources to get new staff up to speed. The simpler your sales system and the more diverse your SaaS platform, the more momentum onboarding gains. Instead of wasting hours on the road coming to know your customers and prospects, reps are allowed the full value of their most powerful asset – time.

The Sales Management Association carried out a study and found that 62% of all businesses feel that they are ineffective at onboarding despite it being a prime area of focus for sales leaders. The only way to increase the efficacy of training programs and the adoption of existing customers and leads without excessive HR staffing costs is to invest in proven sales technology.

Projections, Estimates & Quotas

Sales quotas are assigned on-the-fly far too often.

This leads to a massive productivity loss, unnecessary traveling expenses, and can even ruin your chances with a customer forever if your rep’s timing is terrible. Managers and upper level staff assign responsibilities based on quotas and projections which cannot carry any acceptable degree of accuracy without sales technology being used. Even onboarding and training costs scale sky-high in many businesses due to nothing other than a lack of information and comparative insight. Reps get assigned unrealistic goals and quotas which, other than sucking resources from your business, also drain motivation and enthusiasm. This in turn causes a long-term negative effect on your rep and his or her performance.

Poor customer placement due to speculation rather than reporting and analytics is another cause of collapsing conversions. Good sales software removes all the guesswork allowing every department of your business to strategize with minimal risk. As each decision, delegation and organizational change in your enterpriser is set in place, growth can be relied on rather than a blind-chase towards an earnest estimated goal.

Massive ROI from Sales Technology

No less than 50% of all sales teams report improved productivity after implementing sales technology. Despite the many benefits and numerous ways that you can see sales technology as an asset to your business, many enterprises bring decisions down to a basic deciding factor of return on investment.

Those eager to adopt new sales software and systems will be happy to know that this $36 billion industry delivers a whopping ROI of 245% on average. Over and above this sizable sum, your sales technology will also grow your revenues by 24% per-over-year as your database scales in size and detail.

The more data your software or field sales enablement platform amasses, the greater the scope of its capabilities, accuracy, and benefit to sales. With more information comes efficiency and efficacy improvements, better sales insights, and stronger bonds with existing customers.

From supporting canvassing and customer retention to expanding your marketing reach and even directly boosting revenues, sales technology comes at a fractional cost when you compare it to the massive value added to your ever-expanding enterprise.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales automation and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

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References:

1 – https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2018/12/70-email-marketing-stats-you-need-to-know/
2 – https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/3421285/Bbdboom%20Oct2017/BBD%20Boom%20Blog/BOOM-How-to-manage-leads.pdf
3 – https://blog.capterra.com/easy-and-affordable-crms-for-small-business/
4 – https://www.outerboxdesign.com/web-design-articles/mobile-ecommerce-statistics
5 – https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/prospecting-stats
6 – https://www.salesforce.com/au/blog/2017/07/is-collaborative-selling-the-answer-to-increased-productivity-an
7 – https://spotio.com/solutions/business-to-business/
8 – https://www.brainshark.com/ideas-blog/2018/september/sales-enablement-statistics?language=pt-br
9 – https://learn.g2crowd.com/sales-statistics
10 – https://www.readycloud.com/info/21-CRM-Facts-Your-Business-Needs-to-Know-Now

Expert Series: A Unique Way To Attract Sales Reps

The SPOTIO team recently had the opportunity to discuss recruiting and retaining sales talent with James Peuster, CEO of The Route Pro, a sales route consulting program that specializes in helping dry cleaning companies increase revenue by establishing a route service. James has nearly 20 years’ experience consulting and building dry cleaners across the country. He is a best-selling author and accomplished seminar speaker.

Don’t Be Stymied By a Stigma

According to Peuster, one of the most challenging parts of recruiting door-to-door sales talent for roles in dry-cleaning or similar industries is the stigma associated with the term “door-to-door sales.”  

“When we first started advertising for door-to-door sales positions, we had two main issues,” Peuster said. “First, you would get responses from door-to-door junkies who love this kind of work but tend to hop from job to job looking for the next pot of gold.

According to Peuster, these candidates usually love door-to-door sales but are a risk for leaving the company after you invest in their onboarding.

“Second, you would see a lack in response because of a stigma associated with door-to-door, even though most people find after doing the job that it can be a rewarding and lucrative job.”

Peuster sought to avoid falling victim to the stigma by replacing the words “door-to-door” with phrases like “face-to-face” and “canvassing” in job postings.  

“It’s not that we are trying to trick them or that we’re psychologically trying to fool them into taking a position,” Peuster said. “We want to make it known that there is a door-to-door aspect but there is more to the job.”

According to Peuster, in the dry-cleaning industry and other similar industries, door-to-door sales in not a job, it’s just one responsibility that’s part of a job. With the help of smart prospecting tools like those offered by SPOTIO, traditional door-to-door sales is less common.

“Sometimes it’s just ‘door’ sales because it’s not walking up to one door after the next, but instead canvassing only those with qualified leads.

By eliminating the term “door-to-door” from job postings, Peuster finds that he’s able to reach more candidates who wouldn’t have realized this role is a good fit for their skills and career.

Smart Talent Sourcing

According to Peuster, technology offered by platforms like Indeed.com have changed the game for talent sourcing.

“Indeed has a head-hunting program that allows you to turn around traditional recruiting,” Peuster said. “Instead of traditional recruiting where you post a job and wait for applicants, it allows you to set parameters and alerts you when candidates who meet your parameters update their resume or create a profile.”  

According to Peuster, this functionality provides him with a daily pipeline of qualified candidates. Since you’re looking at candidates who just updated their resume, you can also assume they’re eager to find a job.

Another strategy Peuster uses is to recruit from similar industries that are not necessarily an obvious fit.

“We don’t just look at people who have experience in door-to-door; we look at those with similar experiences, like those working in high-end retail,” Peuster said. “These are people who have that special gift of selling, they like to talk, and they don’t have issues with rejection.”

While it may seem obvious to target those with experience in the same kind of role, it can be more fruitful in the long-term to find the right candidate and train them on the specifics of the job. Peuster also advises his clients to not always go for the obvious candidates.

“One of the best salespeople I’ve seen in the industry is introverted and shy,” he said. “So instead of trying to force him into a box, we trained him to do an introvert-type of sale.

“If you find someone who has the willingness to do the job, you can teach them how to sell in her or his own way. That way they have a sales strategy that works for them and they are connecting with customers versus selling.”

Retaining Talent

If a new employee fails, Peuster says that it’s rarely the fault of the employee. “I blame the situation or the onboarding,” he said.

According to Peuster, keeping good people is easy if you’re willing to invest properly in their onboarding and development.

“A lot of times people – when they hire staff – they look at it as a cost (labor cost) instead of as an investment,” Peuster said. “I encourage my clients to look instead at the ROI of great talent.

“Are they making you money, saving you money, or costing you money?” Peuster asked rhetorically.

According to Peuster, if they’re making you money or saving you money, they are worth investing in as their growth will only improve their results for your sales organization

“Very rarely do I hear people say, ‘How much can I grow my company with a great salesperson?’” Peuster said. “But this is the way you have to look at it.

“Often times people let good salespeople go because they think they are expensive and that they’re costing them money – then they see their sales drop and wonder why.”

Peuster encourages his clients to measure and track performance in a way that helps in understanding the value a salesperson is providing the company.

An Outside Perspective

Peuster offers one more recruiting tip: Get an outside perspective.

According to Peuster, too often when people are trying to recruit, they have a picture-perfect description in their head of the person they think they need. Because of this, they miss great candidates, or worst, they favor candidates with good energy but obvious gaps.

“They think they know what they’re looking for which causes them to overlook less obvious candidates with true potential,” Peuster said. “If you bring in an outside perspective from someone who is not emotionally invested in the process, you’re more likely to get an objective point of view.”

Peuster mentions that this is a great way to see less obvious traits like a willingness to learn and improve, the desire to move up in the company, or simply the willingness to do the job well. He also focuses on positive interview questions that allow the candidates to demonstrate their potential and avoids questions that are intended to uncover negative traits in the candidate.

“I focus less on trying to source the perfect candidate and more on how to develop people into what you need them to be,” Peuster said. “Sometimes when you invest correctly in someone who seems like an average candidate, you end up with amazing talent.”

James Peuster  

The Route Pro

 

 

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 sales enablement and territory management app to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity in just 2 weeks.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

Expert Series: How Sales Consultant Michael Rosenberg Wows Customers by Recruiting & Retaining Top Talent

An Interview With An Industry Leader in Door-to-Door Sales

The SPOTIO team recently had the opportunity to sit down with “The Brand Ambassador Guy,” Michael Rosenberg, and learn from his successful 35-year career leading companies driven by door-to-door sales. Rosenberg started his door-to-door sales career at age 12 when building his paper route. After years of tremendous growth across 22 states and building to millions in revenue, he sold his company in 2008.

Today, Rosenberg acts as an executive coach and consultant, helping companies around the globe optimize their door-to-door sales operations with a tremendous focus on talent strategy, recruitment and retaining talent. In this article, we’ll share what we learned from Rosenberg, including his go-to strategies for recruiting and retaining rock-star talent.

An Unconventional Interview Process

“I can teach pretty much anything, but there are two things I simply can’t teach – I have to hire for them,” Rosenberg said. “I can’t teach people to be likable, and I can’t teach people to be persistent.”

Kindness is King

According to Rosenberg, the first quality he looks for in a job candidate is a relatable and likeable personality.

“Whether I’m using a video conference or meeting someone for lunch, I look first for nice,” Rosenberg said. “I’m looking to see if the person looks me in the eye, says please and thank you, and comes across as a genuine nice person.”

If Rosenberg doesn’t get the warm and fuzzies, he doesn’t move forward. But according to Rosenberg, likeability is the easier of the two unteachable qualities.

Testing for Persistence

According to Rosenberg, traditional interview questions fail to truly test for persistence. That’s why Rosenberg consistently leverages a strategy he learned from The Ultimate Sales Machine author, Chet Holmes.

The strategy is based on the theory that most customers are going to say “no,” or “come back later.” When you ask traditional interview questions about how candidates handle rejection, they’ll likely provide a scripted example. There’s no way to know if that story represents their consistent and repeatable behavior.

“I need a sales rep that’s not going to back down,” Rosenberg said. “When they hear no, I need to know they’ll keep going. And I need a way to simulate that in the interview.”

To do this, Rosenberg takes an unconventional approach. He rejects them in the interview and observes their reaction.

“Eight out of ten candidates are going to accept the rejection,” Rosenberg said. “These are not the right candidates for me.”

According to Rosenberg, about one out of ten will get angry and defensive. He usually hires these candidates for their grit, but these are not the candidates who show the most promise.

“The best candidates will say something like, ‘Thank you for the feedback, but what is your definition of a rock star sales rep?’ with ease and grace.”

Rosenberg is looking for candidates who are not going to take no for an answer, but they’re going to be polite about it. They may switch gears by telling you a story.

“They’ll tell you about the time they didn’t make the basketball team but kept showing up for practice, or a time that they pushed really hard to earn something,” Rosenberg said. “And they’re going to keep telling stories with ease and grace – those people have superstar potential.”

Finding and Developing Leaders

According to Rosenberg, building out a quality sales force is only half the battle. If you want to grow a company exponentially you must focus on attracting and developing leaders – people who can run businesses.

Rosenberg cites The E-Myth by Michael Garber as the book that changed his mindset about building his business.

“If you want to be wildly successful, you have to work on your business, not in your business,” Rosenberg said, citing the popular book.

Rosenberg acknowledges that while door-to-door sales is a tough game, great door knockers are not always great business leaders. To reach exponential growth, you have to find people who can run companies.

“I’ve become successful by finding people ten times more capable than myself,” Rosenberg said. “I find people with the potential to run companies, and I fast track them.”

Rosenberg believes that company leaders should have first-hand experience in their business, so he starts them at the bottom even if they have great leadership experience.

“I make a commitment from the beginning,” Rosenberg said. “If leadership recruits hit their numbers in four to six weeks, I tell them they will be offered the chance to manage one of my offices.

“And at six months, as long as they are honest, hard-working, and people respect them, I’m going to make them my partner.”

According to Rosenberg, the key was to get out of the day-to-day business and shifting his focus on finding top talent who would run their companies as their own.

“Sometimes this means I took profits of my company and put them in business,” Rosenberg said. Sometimes it was through franchise, partnership, or a company store, depending on the situation.”

Retaining Talent

According to Rosenberg, retaining talent has never been an issue for him in his experience and this method to success is very simple.

“Retaining talent comes down to creating a great company culture, creating good air, and focusing on things people care about like recognition, incentives, good comp plans, and benefits,” Rosenberg said. “Also, retention often comes from the spouse and family.

“I do my best to make sure the family is happy and proud of the company their family represents.”

According to Rosenberg, 99 percent of companies are shaped like an upright pyramid. Everyone’s job is to make the owner on the top money. Rosenberg believes this is philosophically backwards and instead encourages the organizations he consults to operate as an upside-down pyramid that puts the boss at the bottom and the customer on top.

“As a leader, your job is to serve the team, so that they in turn are motivated to serve the customer” Rosenberg said. “When the boss serves the team, creates great mentorship and advancement opportunities, and treats the team like family, the team is committed to doing what’s right for the customer.”

If you treat your employees well, they treat your customers well – Everything comes full circle, he said.

Want more from Michael Rosenberg?

After a wildly successful career in door-to-door sales, Rosenberg now helps others reach their full potential. To learn more or to contact Rosenberg directly for a free coaching session, reach out to him on LinkedIn.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration platform to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

How To Manage 1099 Sales Reps

Maximizing corporate revenues often boils down to one key (and invaluable) internal component: sales. An effective sales team does more than build robust client pipelines; proficient account executives are your company’s frontline, continuously sourcing new opportunities to edge out the competition, steal market share, and broaden your brand’s reach within your targeted demographic.

Previous generations of business owners relied on traditional (read: W2) hiring methods to staff their sales positions. However, today’s entrepreneurs recognize that bringing on full-time employees isn’t the only way to develop their sales team. Instead, companies across every industry are opting to work with independent (read: 1099) account reps to optimize selling results and success.

W2 Or 1099? Know The Benefits Of Hiring Independent Contractors As Sales Reps For Your Business

Would hiring independent contractors work for your business? Understanding some of the many benefits offered with this hiring model can help you determine if it’s the right choice for your organization. Staffing your team with 1099 account executives can:

Lower overall financial responsibility and risk compared to full-time internal sellers

Deliver faster connection to your marketplace, particularly when hiring 1099 reps with extensive industry experience and an established client network

Provide access to a virtually unlimited talent pool

Best of all, 1099 sales reps often work strictly on a commission basis. You’ll only have to pay out based on closed deals, which can instantly increase cash flow and bottom line profits.

Of course, every staffing approach brings with it a potential opportunity cost to consider before making the hire. Sure, you may own the business or “manage” the rep; however, you ultimately have no real authority over a 1099 account executive. While you’re not paying for underperformance if they don’t make a sale, you may still experience loss of growth, potential revenue, and market share if your reps fail to produce the results needed to propel your brand forward.

Tips For Success With Your 1099 Selling Staff

If you do decide to move forward with 1099 sales reps, it’s essential to address several considerations for hiring success. When onboarding your independent contractors, always:

Outline Clear Deliverables

Independent contractors often enjoy more job flexibility than their full-time employee counterparts. They make their own hours and come in and out of the office on an as-needed basis, which is great, right?

Yes and no.

While you’ll want to encourage your independent reps to be out in the field as often as possible, you’ll also want to develop a specific outline of deliverables. Manage expectations right at the start of the engagement to help your hires understand their roles, responsibilities, and timeframe for results.

Define Commission Structure

In most cases, your independent contractors will work solely on commission, which is often higher than what your standard employees earn. Be clear and specific about the commission structure, so your hire knows exactly what will be paid with each closed deal. You will also want to discuss how you’ll be invoiced to establish a well-defined billing/payment process before the first sale.

Create An Effective Onboarding Program

The best way to set your independent contractor up for success is to help assimilate your sales rep with the rest of your internal team. Develop an onboarding and training strategy that not only helps them understand exactly how to promote your products and services but also identifies key support personnel that can manage administrative responsibilities.

Integrating your 1099 rep with the rest of your staff can help minimize ramp-up time, streamline the transition phase, and equip your independent contractors to stay focused on their two primary selling objectives: closing deals and boosting revenues.

Have you outsourced your sales positions to independent contractors? Was it a success story or a cautionary tale? Tell us all about it in the comment below!

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales automation and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

16 Sales Competencies That Define Winning Sales Teams

Employee turnover is expensive. Hiring the best sales professionals is crucial for organizations.

Excellent sales candidates will have a specific set of core sales competencies. It is the manager’s job to uncover these competencies in the interview process.

What makes a great sales candidate?

Sales competencies for sales professionals are shared across the sales team in order to produce the most successful reps. These core competencies span every role on the sales team, from rep to manager.

In this article, we’ll define core sales competencies, discuss why they are critical to the sales and management process.

What Are Sales Competencies?

Sales competencies are the skills successful reps use to influence buying decisions.

These aptitudes are both inherent traits to their personality and skills or processes that can be trained and practiced. Understanding what these select proficiencies are, how they contribute to a sales professional’s success, and how to recognize them in a candidate will make a significant difference in your ability to hire the right people and reduce sales rep turnover.  

3 Core Competency Areas for Any Sales Professional

Whether they are converting inbound sales calls, fighting it out in the field or managing from behind the front-lines, sales professionals need a particular set of foundational skills.

Sales core competencies center around three areas:

1. Systems. How do you get a person from a prospect to a closed deal? Short answer: systems and processes. Systems encompass the ways your processes lead to sales. From prospecting to time management to uncovering new opportunities from established accounts, systems sales core competencies are ways sales reps achieve their goals. Per Rain Sales Training, sales reps should have skill areas that help them drive opportunities, account growth, and ultimately, success.

2. People. Sales is always about people, so reps and managers must have People skills – the ability to lead and manage a conversation, to create emotional engagement, and earn the trust of others.  

3. Sales. All reps need to effectively prospect, manage pipeline, uncover pain, capture benefits, demonstrate product-fit, and negotiate the close.

16 Competencies That Define High-Performing Sales Teams (By Category)

Systems: Competencies that Improve the Sales Process

1. Prospecting: Finding needs in the marketplace keeps the pipeline full of potential customers for new business. It’s essential to research industries, uncover the main friction points, and define the ideal customer profile

Essential attributes for this area would be the ability to comprehend various businesses and the related challenges of the sectors, a talent for asking the right questions, even the tough ones, and, as the sales training experts the Gulas Group says, a focus on getting prospects to “quantify the pain.”

2. Upselling: Reps need to be able to identify opportunities for expansion revenue. For sales managers, this area entails watching the team’s account management approach and training them to incorporate a way of “checking in” with accounts to stay on top of any changes or new opportunities.

Key attributes for this area would be active listening, attention to detail in account management, and knowing what questions to ask when.

3. Time Management: Self-management is a significant factor influencing success in sales because often there is little oversight and accountability for a sales rep’s activity day-to-day. It is incumbent upon the rep and manager alike to keep themselves on task and address each part of the sales process.

Necessary attributes of people accomplished at managing time are that they can communicate how they divide their time between the various stages of the sales cycle and what tools they use to measure their progress toward these goals.

4. Plan for Success: A talent for planning is essential because shows how sales professionals intend to accomplish their goals. Effective planners know the end goal and plan around achieving those goals. An effective planner has a day-to-day breakdown of their time and a way to record progress, as well as the ability to share why it works for them and examples of past successes as a result of their behavior.  

5. Accountable: When it comes to sales competency, the capacity to see how one’s actions create results is a huge predictor of success. People who understand how what they do creates reactions will be successful because they own their process and the results they get with it. Sales professionals who have an aptitude for taking responsibility tend to internalize the blame rather than accuse others. They also accept that it is impossible to control everything, and instead concentrate on managing their actions and reactions to situations. These individuals also recognize that it is okay to fail—even though they would rather succeed.

6. Ownership: Sales competency also includes the concept of owning one’s actions. A person who owns the sale asks tough questions at the appropriate times, knows when to push a deal that is dragging on, and isn’t afraid to get to a fast no. The Gulas Group says, when a sales rep owns the sale, he or she “doesn’t need approval” and gets the job done.

People: Competencies that Build Rapport and Trust

7. Build Rapport: It’s crucial that sales reps and managers know how to create emotional engagement with people and help buyers consider new ideas.

Key Attributes

– Understanding how to help people relax and get comfortable
– Communicate well
– Foster trust with others

In the case of the sales manager, you need to do what you say you will for your team always—a vital element for excellence in leadership—to build trust with your team.

8. Lead Conversations: An essential sales skill is taking control of the conversation when you need to, and knowing when to let the prospect speak.

Some important behaviors for this sales core competency are:

– The awareness to ascertain the comfort-level of the conversation participants and
– The ability to adapt and move forward, particularly when the unexpected occurs

9. Drive Buying Decisions: Sales is about getting people to buy, so knowing how to encourage people to make a purchase is essential. Key attributes in this area are fearlessness when it comes to asking for a yes and the ability to navigate back to an area of opportunity when the answer is no. Also, excellent listening skills are crucial as what a person says in a sales call long before the closing stages tell you what he or she wants to be included before saying “yes.”

10. Control Emotions: A vital core competency of successful sales reps and managers is the emotional intelligence to manage one’s feelings and the feelings of other people.  Controlling emotions requires much self-awareness and self-confidence.

People with strong core competencies in this area show restraint, do not panic, and know what to say or do at the appropriate time.  

11. Maintain Positivity: Sales is a demanding job, and that staying upbeat and optimistic in slow periods is essential to keep hammering on doors and opening new opportunities.

Sales: Competencies to Crush Your Quota

12. Prospect Consistently: Prospecting is a numbers game that fills the sales pipeline with new potential buyers. Successful salespeople recognize that it is a priority to find new accounts, so they set aside time dedicated to discovering them. The behaviors associated with consistent prospecting include awareness of how many calls it takes to find a new prospect, a record of making those calls promptly, and a willingness to learn from mistakes or outcomes of unsuccessful calls.

Sales managers should be monitoring and coaching their teams to dedicate time, energy, and understanding to this vital area of sales competency.

13. Define Criteria: Knowing who will say yes and how much they will buy are critical bits of information to uncover during the discovery phase of the sale process.

Sales professionals effective at discovering the parameters of a sale will spend less time on accounts with the smallest potential and focus instead on the best opportunities. These sales professionals can get past the gatekeeper and speak to the decision maker. Then, they are efficient at finding out the available budget.

14. Build Solutions: Finding a mutually beneficial way to yes is crucial in sales. An essential skill for sales reps and managers is the ability to read a situation and fix any challenges that occur.

For sales reps, this aptitude exhibits in matching the buyer’s pain points to the product’s features and benefits.

For managers, this sales manager competency presents as a talent for uncovering weaknesses in the team’s systems, process, or skills and addressing them with training.

15. Sell Benefits / Value: For reps, sales competency is shown in their ability to not only explain the feature of the product or service, but how it solve their pains. For managers, this manifests in the ability to convince salespeople to adopt their suggestions into their personal sales process.

16. Negotiating Prowess: While presenting value is critical to success, the ability for sales reps to customize the deal for the buyer leads to more sales.

Sales managers must also adjust their expectations to their team’s needs to get the best performance from their sales reps. People who are excellent at negotiation know it means getting mutual agreements in stages, knowing when to hold your ground, and having some wiggle room to get the deal approved ahead of time.

3 Competencies That Don’t Dictate Sales Success

We just covered seventeen sales competencies that are crucial to sales team success for both sales reps and managers. However, there are a few competencies that you should not worry about as much.

In other words, here are three areas you should stop emphasizing:

1. Education: It is natural to assume a person who has achieved many academic successes and a long list of degrees will be excellent at sales. While it is true that the best sales professional candidates should be smart and articulate, they do not have to have excellent grades or a slew of diplomas to be successful sales professionals.  

2. Geniality: Being friendly is a magnificent trait in a person and a co-worker. However, friendliness is not essential to sales success. Does that mean the best candidates are rude and unsociable? Of course not. While sales performance does not necessitate being the prospect’s best friend, it does need the rep to be likable and trustworthy.

3. Thoroughness: In nearly any other job, being a conscientious rule-follower is a plus for success, but not in sales. As we mentioned earlier, sales professionals should be hard workers that use systems, but they should also be flexible and adaptable to the situations as they present themselves.  

Let Sales Competencies Define the Hiring Process

Sales competencies are why salespeople can do what they do. Sales manager competencies are how sales managers get them to do it. Both are the skills and talents the sales professionals have for influencing the behavior of others.

There are core competencies for sales professionals that are critical to the members or potential members of any sales team. These sales core competencies fall within the three areas, which include Systems they use, People skills they have, and Sales mechanics they employ. From time management to leading conversations well to negotiating tactics, the sales competencies list is long and detailed.

However, while the list is long, some common competencies for success in other jobs are not on it. Education, geniality, and thoroughness seem like they would be vital, but experience shows they are not crucial for sales success. That said, having those competencies certainly would not hurt a candidate.

Understanding the key elements that fit within each of the core competencies will make defining job roles and expectations much easier, and ensure you are hiring the most qualified candidates. Perhaps most importantly, employing the most qualified candidates could also make you the least likely to be retaining their replacements in a few months.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 sales performance and territory management app to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity in just 2 weeks.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

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Sources:

Schultz, Mike. “Core Competencies of Successful Sellers.” www.rainsalestraining.com Web 21 November 2018. https://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/core-competencies-of-successful-sellers.

“21 Core Competencies of Successful Salespeople.” www.gulasgroup.com. Web. 21 November 2018. http://www.gulasgroup.com/sales-competencies.shtml.

Lawrence, Ph.D., Amy. “5 Competencies to Focus on When Hiring Salespeople.” www.selectinternational.com. Web. 26 November 2018. http://www.selectinternational.com/blog/5-competencies-to-focus-on-when-hiring-salespeople.