How to maximize sales team performance
Meta: Growing a profitable sales team can be a challenge. In this post we look at how to assess your sales team to make sure your sales team is supported in doing their best work.
Any time you let your business run on autopilot, whether it’s daily administrative tasks or sales, you create a situation where you risk inefficiencies creeping into your business that can impact your ability to grow a profitable sales team. Sometimes they don’t cause any problems and your business continues without issue.
Other times, they cause problems, and if your sales team isn’t running as smoothly as it could be, that costs real money.
That’s why it’s always a good idea to conduct regular assessments of your business, particularly the sales team.
What is a sales team assessment?
A sales team assessment is a data-driven look at how effective your growing sales team is.
It’s a way of identifying whether or not your strategy utilizes the various members of your sales team effectively. You do this by studying their sales stats and observing how they interact with customers during the various stages of a sale (from qualifying the lead through to closing the deal).
As you follow your sales team through their process you start to notice where they excel, for instance, maybe they’re skilled in the discovery phase, and areas where they need work, maybe (let’s face it, often..) their follow-up game is weak.
Beyond that, you learn if you’ve got the right people handling the right parts of the process. Maybe you need to bring in more closers. Or maybe you don’t. Without a regular assessment of your sales team, you’ll never know for sure, and growing a profitable sales team will be a challenge.
How to conduct a sales team assessment
Sales team assessments are most effective when you do them regularly, once a quarter is a good frequency. Building a routine around conducting assessments means that you have the data you need to fine-tune both your growing sales team and your sales process to help you improve profits.
When you’re running an assessment, you’re paying attention to a couple of different things. The first is that you’re looking at CRM data. Details like number of follow-ups, how often they follow-up, what methods of communication are they using (assuming your CRM can track emails and phone calls), what methods of communication seem to be the most effective, how often discounts are used, and, of course, how many sales they close.
The data you gather from your CRM gives you a starting point in your assessment. You effectively know how good they are selling your product.
From there, you watch them in action. Reviewing sales calls is the only way to effectively gather the information you need to do a sales assessment.
The data you gather from the CRM is useful, and by also seeing your sales team in action, you gain the context you need to help them improve. By reviewing recordings, you also get a truer representation of what salespeople really do, as they will not be adapting their behavior as they would if you joined the meeting “live”.
The key is to watch how they perform at all stages of the meeting. Pay attention to details like:
How well they prepare for the meeting. Are they gathering up all the important pieces of information about the prospect?
Are they doing anything to prepare that seems to work especially well? What’s missing?
How well do they actually use what they prepared during the meeting to improve the conversation with their prospect?
How well they execute the discovery process. Are they making effective use of the information they gather in discovery to push the conversation forward?
Are they figuring out what the real criteria the client has, what will make them happy 6 to 12 months down the road?
Do they secure a clear next step?
Are they following up? What is their follow-up process like? How many times do they reach out? What’s the frequency of follow-ups?
Are they using information from the initial meeting to start the next meeting? This is things like, “Last time we spoke, we agreed…” or “Has anything changed since our last meeting?”
Assess your sales team on a scale of 1-3 or 1-5 from poor to excellent as you see fit. This way you can identify and objectively measure any areas where they may need coaching or training to improve their performance.
Finally, look at their closes. What types of close are they using? Are there any that are particularly effective? How well are they using all the information they gained during their meetings is an important part of the close. If they’re not using that information effectively, or they’re not gathering the right information, then they may need some guidance around that.
Identify individual and team weaknesses and plan to host training sessions to close those gaps, ideally supported by 1:1 coaching for reps that need it, or want to be the best they can be.
Don’t have the time to conduct a proper sales team assessment?
As you can probably tell, a sales team assessment is an investment of time to complete the process because it involves reviewing each member of your sales team’s performance and providing them with the guidance they need to improve. It’s not so bad if you’ve got a dedicated sales leader as this will be one of their roles, but if you are wearing many hats such as CXO and sales leader, or you have not done this type of assessment before, you may need some help. Especially if you’re going to assess your team once a quarter.
The good news is that we can help with that. We’ve got an established process that helps us understand the strengths and weaknesses of each member of your team. And we have the experience to help them improve.
If you’re ready to get serious about assessing your sales team and improving sales, or want us to run your sales team for you, let’s talk.