Do you have a high performing sales team? If not, what is the model you are looking to emulate? Many successful sales leaders seek to have a high performing sales team without defining exactly what that looks like outside of meeting or exceeding sales goals. However, to be truly successful there are 5 key attributes the team should embody.
First, effective leadership should be steering and empowering the team in the right direction. Organizations that have a strong leader with the ability to empower team members with direction and execution, consistently achieve greater results. When team members are continuously motivated by leadership, their performance and overall energy to produce results, increase. Some organizations enable their teams through more connections and direction, while others have their salespeople essentially fending for themselves. Your sales leadership is the air traffic controller for your organization. Without the right leadership in place, your sales team members won’t reach optimal performance metrics and top talent may go elsewhere.
Second, there must be accountability established for each individual within the team. Any sales organization that has performed to high standards, has a team that has taken accountability for their performance on the team. Each member knows their role and takes ownership for their results. What is the buy-in level of your salespeople? Are they chasing quarterly and annual goals for recognition and reward, or mindlessly chasing after leads, trying to get by each week? When you get a team of highly accountable salespeople working together, the accountability combined with competitive atmosphere, create a winning dynamic, no matter what you are selling.
Third, your sales process should be working like a well-oiled machine. No matter what industry you fall in, having an effective sales process has always been an essential requirement to building and maximizing sales organization success. Without a process, team members will miss crucial steps in the selling process, detrimental to their and your long-term success. Without effective follow up, important customer notes, and a genuinely felt care for the customer, your salespeople will struggle to hit goals consistently. Your largest goal in sales leadership is providing your team members with the proper tools and abilities to sell more services/product. Without a sales process a salesperson can easily skip over vital steps and touch points that one of your competitors will gladly take to get the sale.
Fourth, ensure you have a competitive but people focused environment. Top talented people want to work somewhere that pushes them and raises the standards for their work. If you’ve been successful at hiring these individuals for your team, you’ll want to make sure that you do what is necessary to secure them long-term. These high performers are always thinking about how to obtain more. They’re highly competitive people that are pushed by competition and recognition. If you’re able to create an environment where they can maximize earnings, while competing against people they respect, you’ll have set up an environment they’ll work hard to win in and stay in long-term. Create an environment that creates a competitive arena and celebrates top performers.
Fifth, high performing sales teams work in an organization that understand how to serve their clients well. From the first point of interaction through renewing the client YOY, customer satisfaction and establishing a deeper relationship are the driving forces for sales organization success. Today’s expectations for service is at an all-time high. With all the options readily available in the world, organizations must have an emphasis on customer experience, or their competitors will do it for them. Customer experience is now the leading sales benchmark for a sales organization’s success. How well the customer feels they are being served can ultimately determine whether they buy from a vendor or not. And certainly renewing their purchase comes from their overall experience. High performing sales teams know how to put this into existence and maintain for long-term success. Making the buying process simple and stress free for the customer has become an expectation in most industries.
Having a high performing sales team, working efficiently and effectively toward the same goals will enable your organization to increase its close ratio and its annual renewal rate. Don’t settle for less.
Joel Puthoff is the founder and president of Fortune 5 Consulting offering sales and marketing consulting services out of Charlotte, NC.