Sales managers have the difficult task of making sure that the team is on top of its game: hitting (even exceeding) targets, maintaining excellent customer relations, producing a steady amount of quality leads, and overall generating more revenue for their company.
So, how can sales managers ensure this?
What is Sales Management?
A sales manager performs these tasks regularly to ensure the success of the team and the organization:
- Develop a Sales Strategy
- Supervise the Successful Implementation of Sales Strategy
- Set Key Performance Indicators
- Monitor and Evaluate Representatives’ Performance
- Maintain Consistent Reporting on Systems and Processes
- Training, Coaching, and Mentoring
9 Best Sales Management Strategies
Aside from consistently doing the above, you, the sales manager, can manage your team more productively with these 9 killer sales team management strategies:
1. Set clear goals.
Be very clear about what you want to achieve every day, every week, every month, every meeting, every phone call, etc. Big or small, set clear goals for you and your team.
“I want you to get an appointment after this call.”
“I want a report on customer retention for the first quarter by this Friday.”
“I want to hit $3 million in sales by end of the month.”
Your team will work better if they know exactly what they need to achieve.
2. Foster a learning environment.
Create an environment for the team that encourages learning and growth. Here’s how:
- Provide regular constructive feedback. Your team should be open to hearing constructive feedback. What’s a constructive feedback? It outlines not just their weaknesses but their strengths too, the areas they need to improve, and what they’re doing well. Constructive feedback is also SMART.
- Set regular trainings. Take the initiative to set in-house trainings (led by you or other speakers). Send members to conferences; enroll them in webinars.
- Encourage members to invest 10-15 minutes of their time each day to learn something new. Whether that means reading blogs and books, listening to podcasts, or simply following thought leaders on social media.
3. Hire the best.
You get a great kick-start when you have a good team behind you so make sure that you hire the best people to do the job.
You would think that this is a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised to know how hiring for some companies does not undergo a very thoughtful process. Find and hire the best employees and a quick advice: go easy on the old adage “slow to hire, quick to fire.”
4. Create a winning culture.
There are many ways you can develop a winning culture within the team:
- Celebrate wins and reward great results. Give credit where credit is due. Recognize any win from your end, no matter how big or small. Acknowledge the win within the team.
Give rewards, like a lunch out, a gift certificate, or a day off, to those who’ve contributed to the team. Celebrating and rewarding wins motivates your people; it also gives them a sense of pride and job satisfaction.
- Promote healthy competition. Competition helps your team work together towards a shared goal. A little friendly competition within the team will also help motivate them.
5. Always be on your guard: look for potential issues, road blocks, signs of trouble, and the like.
Defense is the best offense. You have to nip a potential problem in the bud by being proactive. Look for early signs of trouble—whether it’s the poor attendance of one particular rep, a kink in the workflow system, or behavioral changes within the team.
Monitoring performance and having the requisite metrics for your sales team will help you track everything. You can track everything from attendance and number of scheduled appointments to time spent selling, lead response time, sales activities, and more.
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6. Every moment is an opportunity to mentor—and provide one-on-one coaching, too.
It is your job to provide regular training, coaching, and mentoring. It doesn’t have to be a major event each time; in fact, you can mentor your members anytime, even in casual conversations. Providing feedback is also a form of coaching.
That said, it is also important that you set aside time for one-on-one coaching. You can drive revenue with sales coaching. Here’s a template you can use for a coaching plan, while this one is more in-depth.
7. Use technology to simplify and streamline processes.
Technology exists to make life easier, so maximize its use. A mobile CRM is one such technology. It helps improve your team’s productivity by fostering productive collaboration and streamlining and simplifying even the most complex processes.
Choose technologies that can be easily integrated into existing systems, and make those systems work better. What do you need help with? What do you need to do better? There’s a technology for that.
8. Be consistent but also flexible when needed.
You have to be consistent: with your rules, your processes, your systems. Rules and processes are there for a reason: they lay the groundwork, they improve workflow, monitoring and evaluation becomes easier, and so on. And needless to say, you have to set an example and follow these—that’s how you inspire members of your team.
However, you have to be able to recognize situations when you’d need to bend a rule or two, alter a process a bit. You should be able to step back and see the bigger picture. Time and experience will help you recognize these occasions.
9. Keep it fun!
Sales is an extremely competitive environment. But don’t forget to have fun! Know when to work hard, and when to play hard. Inject fun into the workplace. Your team members will recognize and appreciate your efforts. And the bottom line: happy employees are more productive.
