steps to create a sales team
You work hard to build your business and launch your product. You've done your market research and you know you have a quality product that your customers want. But how are you going to promote and sell your product? With the right sales team, your new product could be the next big thing in the market.
Increasing the profitability of sales is the key to the sustainable and profitable growth of an organization. To achieve your sales and growth goal, you not only need to build a high-performing sales team, but structure it so you can scale quickly to support your growth.
Building the right sales team involves more than just posting an employee search ad on rabota.ru, Superjob or Avito. You need to set your reps up for success by giving them the right sales tool, creating measurable performance metrics, and motivating them to reach their desired sales quotas. In this article, we will look at the main stages of creating a sales team and how to set it up for success.
Determine what type of sales team you need
The type of sales professionals your organization needs depends on your business model, the nature of your products or services, the growth of the business, and your target market. Consider whether you need internal sales, field sales, or both.
Determine the level of training and experience required, and determine the number of sales representatives you need to deploy. You will also need to decide on the processes and tools that will be required to develop their skills.
Planning these events ahead of time ensures that you hire the right people for the right job. Once you've determined what type of sales force you'll need to bring in, you can start hiring them.
Hire the right employees
Your first hires will most likely be account managers and this is where finding the right talent is critical, as effective account managers can close up to 45% of good deal opportunities compared to inefficient ones who have less than 15%.
Talented sales professionals are smart and think outside the box, as well as thoughtfully respond to a conversation with a potential client. They are easily trained, curious, modest and willing to learn from others. Most also have a competitive spirit that drives them to work hard and achieve results.
Develop a repeatable sales process
The sales process is the set of steps your sales team takes to move a prospect through the sales funnel. The funnel includes searching, connecting, exploring, presenting, and closing.
To increase sales, make sure your sales reps provide consistent customer service. They will do this by following a streamlined sales process to achieve repeatable results. Therefore, there is a need for a documented and repeatable sales process that your entire team must follow.
Define key performance indicators to measure success
As the saying goes, "what gets measured gets done". By setting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and clearly communicating sales goals to your team, you can align everyone with the company's long-term vision while empowering them to take initiatives that will lead to meaningful results.
Some important sales KPIs that you should measure are:
- sales growth;
- purpose of sales;
- the cost of attracting customers;
- duration of work with the client and its value;
- customer churn rate;
- attitude of potential customers to opportunities;
- the ratio of opportunities to closure;
- conversion rate;
- Profit margin per sales representative.
In addition, use analytics tools and set up a reporting system so that you can extract useful information from indicators and make the right management decisions based on data.
Train and motivate your team
A repeatable and scalable onboarding process is the key to ensuring everyone shares the same “institutional knowledge” so your team can deliver a predictable and consistent sales experience.
Use gamification to motivate your team with a points system and leaderboard. This engages the competitive instincts of many sales reps. For example, you can encourage team members to introduce new sales tools or achieve certain results through various sales contests.
You also need a reward system that links performance to commissions and bonuses to incentivize sales reps. This will allow you to balance costs and risks while attracting the best sellers.
Use the right sales tools
Digitization and automation enable rapid and efficient scaling. Use them to your advantage by learning the vast amount of customer information you have at your disposal. Using the right sales tools effectively will enable sales reps to make data-driven decisions and thus improve ROI.
Invest in the right software applications to help you drive sales, customer engagement, analytics, and management/learning. This will allow your team to streamline workflow and increase sales productivity.
Use a reliable communication platform
Most of today's sales are done over the phone. You will need reliable cloud contact center software that can provide the required capabilities on demand. These tools allow you to access best-in-class communications as you grow, without a significant upfront investment.
For example, a cloud call center platform enables the use of a remote sales team, which makes it possible to find potential employees while reducing operating costs. It also has many monitoring and reporting features so you can get real-time analytics to improve your sales performance.
Apply talent retention measures
Hiring each new employee costs the company a lot of money. Don't waste money by constantly hiring and training new sales reps. The last thing you want is high employee turnover, which will increase hiring costs, decrease sales productivity, and affect customer service consistency.
Therefore, it is important to analyze employee turnover rates and see how employee retention can be improved. For example, by providing proper training, offering promotion opportunities, improving management and leadership style, increasing employee engagement, and boosting morale, you will be able to retain employees.
Conclusion
The eight steps above will help you build a quality sales team. If you have ambitious sales goals, then use these tools to build a great team to help you achieve them.
By first determining what type of sales team you will be building, you can be sure that you are hiring the right people for the right job. By developing a recurring sales process and identifying measurable performance metrics, you'll set your people up for success right from the start.
Finally, by motivating and giving your team the right tools to do their job effectively, you will improve team spirit and reduce employee turnover. All of this will result in a successful sales force that can scale quickly as your company grows.
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