HOW TO BUILD AN EFFECTIVE SALES TEAM?

As a sales manager or director, you know that building a sales team that meets (or better yet, exceeds) your goals is a real challenge. The stakes are high because a successful sales team has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line.

To achieve this, you need to create synergy between the different personalities of your salespeople, taking into account each person’s background and strengths, but also the realities of the industry, including the changes that digital brings. So, what’s the best way to train a struggling sales team? Discover some keys in this article.

Content

what makes a good sales team?
The most important tools for your sales team

1.What makes a good sales team?

To be effective, a sales team must be made up of complementary profiles with solid technical knowledge (especially mastery of acquisition methods and digital tools) and interpersonal skills that make the difference with potential customers (persuasion, confidence building, organization…).

But that’s not enough: A sales team that delivers the best performance, from lead acquisition to customer retention, depends first and foremost on a segmented sales organization aligned with the marketing department.

Le vendeur de demain ne serait-il pas un mélange de marketeur et de vendeur ?

The marketing and sales departments of a company complement each other. But with digital, the lines between the two departments are blurring, so you might wonder if they will become one hybrid profession in the future.

Not at all: to improve your company’s bottom line, sales and marketing must be aligned with common goals. The implementation of a service level agreement seals this cooperation.

In the case of an inbound marketing strategy, for example, marketing is responsible for creating content that attracts the number of leads needed to meet sales goals. At the same time, the sales team can be a source of suggestions and provide information to improve segmentation.

Should the sales function be divided according to the skills of the sales force?

An effective sales policy requires management that takes into account the skills of each employee. We are talking here about operational and technical skills (which can be reinforced by training), but also soft skills, which refer to human qualities.

Below you will find some criteria to take into account when assigning sales objectives and defining the action plan of your sales teams:

The mastery of digital tools: some salespeople are more familiar than others with a CRM or a sales intelligence solution;

Market knowledge: each employee has a unique background, experience and vision of the market;
Preferred prospecting methods: some profiles have a constant thirst for challenges and new hires (hunters), while others swear by data and prefer to proceed methodically and carefully (analysts).

To build a successful sales team, you need to recruit different profiles that complement each other. But that’s not all! Once these people are in your ranks, you need to assign them individual goals and tasks that match their strengths and weaknesses. To leverage your salespeople’s competitive advantage, you must place them in markets and/or sales segments that match their skills.

This organization is beneficial on several levels: you build your customer base and revenue, and it helps motivate your team to thrive in their role.

2.The most important tools for your sales team

Digitalization has brought many changes to all businesses. Paradoxically, it makes some parts of the sales job more complex, while simplifying others.

Fortunately, many customer acquisition tools allow you to adapt to the new consumption habits of your customers and to compete on equal terms, if not more, with your competitors. The task of the manager is to equip his BtoB sales force with efficient tools and to adapt the sales strategy accordingly.

Salespeople, why will digitization make your life easier?

The digitization of the sales function offers many opportunities at all stages of the sales process. Whether at the information, contact, negotiation or closing stage, intelligent and automated solutions take over the management of time-consuming tasks and empower salespeople to close as many deals as possible.

Here are the top 4 benefits your sales force can gain from digitization:

Segmentation of the prospect list: Your salespeople must be equipped with a CRM that allows them to feed and finely segment a database, a reflex that every sales manager should acquire in order to develop personalized actions and prioritize prospects;

Detection of commercial signals: by creating alerts, a sales intelligence solution automatically detects news (fund raising, moving, recruitment campaign…) which allow to deduce the purchase intentions and thus to contextualize your commercial approach;
Sales process automation: to increase your sales performance, opt for tools that automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. For example, reminders to avoid forgetting a prospect or updating your file so that the indicators remain reliable and the information up-to-date;
Implement an inbound marketing strategy: Such a strategy is essential to naturally attract a steady stream of qualified B2B leads – provided you also implement a content marketing strategy that covers the entire sales cycle and meets the expectations of your target audience.

To achieve maximum productivity, the team leader must strategically structure the organization of his sales teams: the distribution of roles must be defined according to the experience and skills of each person. The fact that each employee feels comfortable in his or her place, without envying the other, reinforces the team’s motivation and cohesion.

Finally, it is important to invest in digital tools and to offer regular training to sales people so that they can improve their skills in the strategic and operational aspects of their work.

Plus d’informations

Si vous souhaitez en savoir plus sur les meilleurs prestataires de services à la clientèle, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter. Vous devrez remplir le formulaire fourni sur notre site Web.