Any sales team can hit a high note for a single month. But a sales team that consistently meets and exceeds expectations over the long haul only happens when you follow a deliberate and careful strategy. A defined and formalized sales process is one of the strongest indicators of future revenue.
The most effective sales teams across industries, especially in SaaS, are the most efficient. When their processes work like a well-oiled machine, it’s much easier for everyone on the team to pull in the same direction. This efficiency comes from solid plans that everyone believes in and implements paired with the right tools to keep your team organized and information at your fingertips.
If you want to see your team grow into a consistent revenue powerhouse, follow these five techniques.
1. Establish future success with deliberate onboarding and training.
Success begins on day one with onboarding a new sales rep.
Give new team members a chance to listen to pitches and prompt them to reflect on how to respond. Then, hold pitch practice sessions to help new team members gain confidence. Don’t just do this once or twice and consider a rep trained. Daily practice and repetition will lead to the level of mastery you need to bring together a unified team.
Take the time to establish 1:1 meetings each week with your new reps to talk about what’s going well, what isn’t, where they are succeeding and where there is room for improvement.
Allow new members to shadow more experienced team members. Mentorship early on and often provides both new and seasoned reps an opportunity for continued growth. It also encourages relationship building across your team.
Educate your new sales rep on your customers specific needs and pain points. Effectively diagnosing a customer’s pain points and providing solutions is one of the best ways to improve your team’s effectiveness.
A rep may know how to pitch, but what matters is that they can pitch to the right audience. That means training them to listen, empathize, and identify needs.
Training doesn’t end after onboarding. Keep updating your team on new practices and techniques and provide opportunities for continued development.
2. Set specific goals to drive a successful prospecting plan.
Any good prospecting plan needs to include thoughtful goals that give your team a sense of purpose and the ability to prioritize.
When you provide your team with a sense of direction guided by a clear and compelling vision, you unify them and provide focus. Otherwise, your team becomes shortsighted on simply meeting quotas. It’s like a football team that only thinks about getting to the next game and not making it to the Super Bowl. Without the bigger goal, the smaller ones seem less meaningful.
To define success and the broader vision, communicate the parameters for determining success and the overall vision. Break down larger goals into smaller, practical goals, such as monthly, weekly, and daily goals, to drive your team toward concrete milestones.
3. Maintain a predictable routine.
If you track what your top performers are doing, you’ll discover they have exceptional time management skills and stick to a predictable routine. They know what works, so why change it?
Being a revenue powerhouse, like winning the Superbowl, is about setting goals and establishing the daily rhythms and workflows that make those goals realistic and achievable.
You need plans that are consistent and measurable.
With a set schedule and routine, your team can focus on their work without getting caught up in administrative details. Test out different approaches and find what works, which may differ between different reps. For instance, you can divide the day into blocks of time dedicated to various tasks. Your reps might focus on emails in one block and meetings in another. Another related option is day theming, which allocates specific goals to specific days.
Whatever approach you take, be consistent and collect data to help you make the best decisions about what’s working. That brings us to the next technique.
4. Record and analyze everything.
To know what’s working, you’ll need data. For example, if you want to know your team’s hourly productivity rate and how it changes over time, you’ll need to track sales per hour.
Tracking calls, emails, and sales give you the data you’ll need to determine where your team was, is, and could be. This data-driven decision-making will help you align your sales mission with analytics for concrete feedback.
Without data, you won’t know if you should move forward or pivot in a new direction. Data will also help motivate and push your team to hit new goals. If you know the metrics for one month, you have a specific measure of what’s attainable and what you can challenge your team to strive for next.
Data also shows you where your team is struggling or falling short. It’s easy to applaud the successes, but addressing weak areas is more important so you can adjust quickly and keep the team on point.
This loops back to identifying a core purpose. You need the vision to drive motivation and the data to understand what it takes to get there.
5. Optimize sales time by automating with the right tools.
Your sales team’s day is filled with scheduling, calling, networking, and prospecting, and yours is filled with tracking data to improve performance. None of that happens efficiently without the right tools in place.
You can improve efficiency and increase productivity by automating administrative tasks. The right kinds of tools will reduce the burden of data entry while letting your team collaborate seamlessly.
For instance, an app builder converts a spreadsheet into an app or website without coding know-how and then lets you share that with your team. You can populate this app with data you already have. These tools also provide CRM templates you can begin using right away. Modern tools make data management accessible and fast, allowing your team to focus on what matters most.
With a strategy focusing on clear goals, efficient processes, and the right tools, you can enable your team to hit new goals daily, monthly, and over the long haul.
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