The 3 levers to boost the performance of your sales team
Talkative, aggressive, uncoordinated... if the sales force is the most clichéd job in the company, it is the one that is expected to deliver the most.
But while the ultimate goal of every sales person is to sell you their product or service, you need to be aware of one fact: sales people don't spend all day selling! A recent study showed that the sales force actually spends less than half its time making sales!
So, are salespeople taking it easy? The study carried out by the Sales Inside Lab research centre among thousands of salespeople revealed the following 3 facts:
- The sales force spends 66% of its time on non-sales activities.
- The 3 things that take up the most time in a salesperson's day-to-day work are: managing emails, recording activities and entering customer and sales data.
- Given these constraints, 57% of salespeople expect to miss their targets for the year.
But what if the performance of your sales team depended on more than just their innate gift for the gab? Digitalising your processes, automating your sales management and using sales intelligence tools, discover three essential levers for boosting the performance of your sales team.
1. information: centralised, unified and shared
It can't be said often enough: customer knowledge is power! But while we are confronted every day with a constant flow of data, the real question is how to harness it intelligently to transform it into added value for your business.
Identify your data silos
Every company collects data at different levels of its organisation. The "data silo " phenomenon arises when part of the information is isolated and inaccessible to the whole organisation.
Data silos are the result of three well-known problems:
- a lack of connections between the various tools used internally
- a corporate culture based on withholding information
- an increase in the number of data collection channels, which creates numerous problems for the company.
Your objective? Identify and neutralise these data silos to create a coherent data path and minimise the loss of information.
Centralise your data on a collaborative platform
Now that you have a clear vision of how your data is organised, you need to centralise it. CRM is the essential tool for this stage. As a salesperson's toolbox, CRM enables you to present your customer knowledge in a structured and intelligible way so that it can be put to good use.
Don't forget to choose an open solution that can be connected to the various tools you use internally. For example, does your marketing department use a marketing automation solution? You need to be able to feed "hot" leads back into the CRM so that they can then be processed commercially.
In this way, you can simplify sales management by centralising and displaying the activity of your sales staff, customer engagement, conversion rates and the latest customer activity in real time. This data is invaluable and will help you to improve your sales intelligence and flexibility.
2. Automate sales management
Do salespeople spend 66% of their time on activities other than selling? I hope you've remembered this figure, because it's vital information for analysing your performance. One piece of information, two possible readings:
- The sales force does not spend enough time selling.
- The sales force wastes too much time on administrative tasks.
Simplifying administrative management
As you can see, the challenge is to free up time for your sales force so that they can refocus on selling. Here again, CRM is an asset for simplifying your sales management. Favour ergonomic solutions to ensure that your teams get on board. Here we're looking for all the features to simplify your day-to-day work. Click to call, email messaging, automatic reminders, tasks and appointments, sales opportunity tracking... make the most of the toolbox to boost your team's productivity.
Integrate sales intelligence tools
Over the last few years, new technologies and digital technology have had a major impact on the purchasing process.
By following up your leads within 5 minutes of making contact, you are 9 times more likely to convert them.
It's not a question of sending every incoming lead to your sales team; you need to prioritise the hot contacts that need to be followed up immediately. This is where technology comes in! Let's take the example of an almost indispensable tool: the sales chatbot.
B2B sales are a complex process, and your website is at the heart of the sales process. As the main lead generation channel, the website is often more complex for visitors to understand than they think, and they need to find the information they need - in the easiest and most engaging way possible - to make a buying decision. The chatbot is a very interesting tool in that it enables your prospects to obtain answers more quickly, eliminating friction and increasing your team's responsiveness.
As you can see, you should no longer hesitate to use automation to create personalisation. Marketing automation, chatbots, predictive prospecting- give your sales force the tools they need to become more responsive and personalise their sales pitch.
3. Develop individual and collective potential
Because confident salespeople are more productive, it is essential to consider the strengths of each individual and not to neglect the "human" management strategy of your sales force. One of the tasks of the sales manager, apart from supervising, is also to reassure his team that they are capable of achieving the sales targets set. This is essential if the sales force are to take real ownership of the company's objectives.
Pipe management and targets: determining the right sales benchmarks
Setting a sales forecast that is both ambitious and realistic, collective and individual, influences the motivation and performance of your sales staff.
But it's not that simple. Between management's expectations and achievable targets, forecasting requires a careful balance, but above all a coherent vision based on real indicators.
At INES, we track every stage of the sales cycle using CRM. I can see the conversion rate achieved by each sales person, the number of calls before an appointment is made, the number of appointments before a quotation is drawn up, or the number of quotations before the customer places their first order, etc. All these elements enable us to establish a real sales strategy with achievable targets not only in terms of turnover, but also overall sales volume, which wins over the sales force.
Engage your teams
Changing sales habits, introducing new tools, restructuring your sales team... every change has an effect on your staff and can have a negative or positive impact on their performance.
Targeted knowledge sharing, ongoing training and long-term coaching will enable you to maintain a collective dynamic around your objectives. Give priority to feedback from everyone so that you can adapt and develop the actions you put in place.
A sales person has a tendency to fall into a comfort zone. That's where the risk lies! We mustn't forget either that the new generation Y is gradually entering the job market and is much more open to change and adept at using new technologies and digital tools (applications, social networks, etc.). The challenge therefore lies in bringing together different generations of sales staff and uniting them around a single set of tools, without forgetting, in some cases, to support them in managing change.
Article translated from French