Bakang Kaunda
There is a huge performance challenge in B2B sales organisations. Many people are feeling the pain but are oblivious to the root cause. Every business dreams of having a top selling, efficient and high performing sales team, all the way from the sales president to the sales representative.
Imagine every month having a team that does not only achieve its quota but operates with meticulous synergy and execution on every task, from the smallest to the biggest. It is very difficult to create such a high-performance culture in a business. Every business desires to have one but only a few have managed to actually achieve it, mainly because many businesses do not know what a high-performance sales culture looks like.
But if you find yourself and your business in this situation, do not stress. The initial step toward accomplishing a dominating sales culture is by recognising what traits to emphasise on, implement and monitor as part of your sales management strategy.
Here are a few characteristics to adopt that will ensure that your sales team achieves high performance.
DEFINED SALES PROCESS
So many sales organisations have a poorly designed sales process and even worse some leave the sales process up to the individual reps, letting their top selling reps and poor performers do their own thing, which leads to inconsistent sales results.
The hard question most sales leaders ask themselves is how do they measure to ensure they can optimise around the best sales process for their sales team?
The key is that they need to define their reps sales process. Mapping out each individual reps step and measuring the efficiency between each of them. Many companies have a rough understanding of the process they would like to follow, but with a lack of training the output is inconsistent at best.
SALES STAFF COLLABORATION
Sales professionals are highly competitive and goal-driven by nature. It is what makes them stand out from each other and grow in their career. Unfortunately, these traits don’t go hand-in-hand with assisting others, collaborating, and working for the greater good of the business.
It is important for top management to focus on creating a collaborative culture in the business among the sales staff. It is highly important for top management to cultivate a culture where people are not only fired up to achieve their own goals but also see the benefit of working with others to achieve even more.
Each person has their own unique strengths that make them great at selling, but those individuals need to collaborate with their team to really build a positive sales culture and unlock greater possibilities and results.
DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING AND MINDSET
We live in times of great technological advancement and data is considered the biggest currency in the world. So it is a basic principle that the best way to manage sales today is by the numbers. This simply means that the top management should track the right sales performance metrics in order to keep up-to-date with the sales team and sales operations.
Over and beyond monitoring the sales metrics, the top management will be able to derive actionable insights from this data. Looking at sales pipeline metrics, sales funnel stage conversion rates and lead trajectories are all helpful, as long as top management finds specific areas of improvement as revealed by the data analysis.
TRANSPARENCY THROUGH ALL LAYERS
One trait that I have learned from high performing sales organisations is that they are very transparent. From the sales president to the sales representative, they have nothing to hide. They are very proud of their accomplishments at all hierarchy levels across all departments and will publicly and transparently display their inner workings, even if the performance is less than stellar.
After all, neither sales reps nor anyone else in the company should have unrealistic ‘happy ears’. Using a sales leader board that displays the monthly sales of all your reps is a good start towards creating this type of transparency.
CONTINOUS SALES COACHING
Great teams are a result of continuous learning and coaching throughout the year. Sales team leaders need to study sales performance metrics to identify specific areas of weakness in the sales process of their entire team or an individual rep, then use that information to shore up these weak areas and constantly improve on the previous period’s sales numbers.
