THE SALES FORCE: BUILDING A STRONG TEAM AND INCREASING SALES

As a sales manager or director, you know that the growth of your company is closely linked to the efficiency of your sales team. To optimize your sales performance, you need to recruit competent profiles, equip them with adequate tools for BtoB or BtoC prospecting, and finally develop a sales strategy that takes into account the specificities of these profiles and your company.

In this article, you will find our tips on how to build and manage a successful inside sales force to get the most out of each of your salespeople.

Content

  1. Sellers: first of all, a human story.

2. Salesmen: how to make them work?

1. Salesmen: a human story above all

When training your salespeople, you should first focus on what really makes the difference: people. Each resource has sales, marketing, technical or behavioral skills that need to be considered when recruiting salespeople.

The different types of sellers

A sales team is made up of salespeople with equally diverse and unique professional experiences, skills, ambitions and personality traits. These characteristics give rise to 4 typical sales profiles.

The first two, the analyst and the hunter, are distinguished by their type of sales method:

  • The business analyst: his or her weapons of choice are the data that he or she collects, compares and verifies using specialized solutions (CRM, sales intelligence, etc.). Methodical and meticulous, not to say perfectionist, he takes the time to build a solid argument based on relevant and contextualized information in dashboards and reports. He is very effective in following up on leads with high conversion potential. With a good sense of detail and anticipation, he or she is also able to build customer loyalty through rigorous follow-up.
  • The hunter among salespeople: This profile lives up to its name; he or she is constantly on the lookout for new signings, never shies away from a challenge, and is highly responsive to business opportunities. Dynamic and tenacious, he or she is ideal for penetrating a new market and expanding the client portfolio.

In addition to the mastery of sales techniques, the classification of the different types of salespeople also takes into account the soft skills, i.e. the human skills required by the companies:

  • The empathetic salesperson: With great listening skills, the empathetic salesperson is able to identify, from the first conversation with the potential customer, details on the basis of which he or she will be able to build a relationship of trust with the other person. Not only do they instinctively ask the right questions that encourage the prospect to trust them, thus providing important information for the development of an appropriate sales proposal, but they also practice active listening, an engaging and caring form of communication that often makes the difference for equivalent technical skills.
  • The extroverted salesperson: driven by a strong desire to please, the extroverted salesperson knows how to put the prospect at ease and quickly establish a close and trusting relationship. They maintain a customer-centric approach, which makes them very good at retaining customers or attracting new ones, for example on LinkedIn through social selling.

How to build an effective sales team?

Building an effective sales team requires an organization with complementary profiles. As illustrated above, some salespeople excel at acquiring new customers, while others excel at retention or negotiation. The key is to find the right balance in organizing the sales team at each stage of the buying cycle.

In addition to their profile, salespeople must be proficient in both traditional and digital sales techniques. If you see any gaps in your salespeople, you need to organize coaching sessions so that your salespeople can improve their skills. You also need to ensure that each salesperson is knowledgeable about the products or services sold in your company and has a good understanding of your buyers’ personalities.

In addition, the performance of your sales force depends heavily on the sales tools they are equipped with and how they use them. To maintain your competitive edge, you must regularly introduce new management techniques and tools into your company’s business processes. Learn them individually and gradually, depending on how much each person knows.

Show your sales team why these tools are true allies that can support them at every step of the sales process and automate many tedious tasks so they adopt them without resistance.

Link each marketing and sales solution to a tangible benefit. For example, a CRM solution makes it easier to maintain customer relationships, while a business intelligence tool automatically identifies sales signals.

2. Sales people: how to make them perform?

Recruiting competent and complementary profiles is an essential step in building an unbeatable sales team. But as a sales manager or director of sales, you know that your role does not end there. To ensure the success of your team, and therefore your company, other parameters must be taken into account.

Salespeople: how to recruit them, organize them and make them successful?

When organizing sales, goals and tasks must be tailored to the employees that make up your sales team. For example, “hunter” type salespeople are suited to intensive one-on-one acquisition, while analysts must work in collaboration with the marketing department.

Salespeople are highly competitive by nature. To ensure the long-term success of your sales team, it is important to cultivate a sales policy based on cooperation between salespeople. At the team level, you need to encourage staff to engage in a collective dynamic, including information sharing, which can be enhanced by introducing a CRM.

At the individual level, listen to your salespeople to identify possible frustrations in time. Know the personal motivations of each one: the lure of gain, the desire to rise in rank, the desire to exceed objectives….. Adapt the management of your sales force to the wishes of your employees and value their performance: this will keep all talents motivated, allow them to develop their full potential and avoid tensions.

Tools for an efficient sales force

To increase your sales efficiency, you must also equip and train your sales force with new acquisition tools.

The CRM-Sales Intelligence combination is particularly powerful for optimizing your sales activity. By creating personalized alerts, your sales team automatically detects sales signals. This makes it much easier to identify leads with high conversion potential. Instead of wasting time and energy on cold calling, your sales team can focus on mature targets that are ready to move to the next stage of the sales cycle.

The implementation of an inbound marketing strategy with all the associated personalized content (landing page, newsletter, blog, webinars, white papers…) is essential if you want to capture the attention of potential customers and make them come to you spontaneously.

This technique is the antithesis of traditional marketing and gives the customer a great deal of autonomy in the buying process, in line with new consumer expectations.

The management of your sales teams is based on many criteria. To increase the impact of your sales actions, it is advisable to recruit sales profiles whose operational approaches and personalities complement each other.

Then, there are several levers to motivate your sales team to close as many sales as possible: a management adapted to each temperament, rewards that match the commercial stakes, attractive evolution perspectives or the implementation of a digital strategy that gives them the means to exceed their sales objectives.

 


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