Just showing up is apparently (not) half the battle. In today’s day and age, businesses are highly competitive and chock full of talented resources. But are these resources utilizing their talents and skills effectively? As a sales manager, do you constantly sense a dip in your sales team’s productivity, leading to stagnant performance? So, how can you improve sales rep performance? Before we get into that, let’s understand what affects their performance.
1. Moodiness
moodiness affects sales performanceA recent study shows that ‘moodiness’ is one of many factors affecting a sales representative’s performance. Undoubtedly, the dynamics between a sales manager and the entire team matter and impact one’s morale. Sales teams with high confidence were 21% more profitable and 17% more productive.
2. Fare compensation plan
Fare compensation can improve sales performanceCompensation plays a crucial role in boosting your sales team’s performance. A fare and effective sales compensation plan motivates your sales force and increases business revenue and employee engagement. Therefore, a good sales compensation plan should be a priority for growing businesses.
3. Inconsistent Processes
Consistency creates efficiency sales teamsWithout proper processes, your sales rep will never be able to add value to their entire sales journey. Let’s take the example of a follow-up strategy. Just one followup is too less. Besides, it will leave no room for building relationships with your customers for future deals. Data suggests that 60% of prospects say no four times before buying your product/service, whereas 48% of salespeople don’t even make a single follow-up attempt. Something to think about and set-up consistent and efficient processes across your business.
Now let’s find out how to measure your sales team’s performance.
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Here are a few simple metrics that can help you measure your sales teams collective and individual performance:
1. Funnel Leakage:
This data shows you exactly where in the sales funnel your leads are dropping off. This gives you the opportunity to not just measure your sales reps’ performance but also understand if your processes need to be tweaked or recreated entirely. For this, you must track your entire pipeline and find out at which stage (qualification, demo, negotiation) your leads are most likely to leave.
2. Quota Attainment:
The percentage of your sales team hitting the designated quota allows you to find out if your targets are realistic or not. It also tells you which team members are consistently meeting the targets. If less than 50% of your team is achieving the targets, you must look at reducing your targets. On the other hand, if more than 90% are achieving their targets, you should increase the targets along with the team incentives.
3. Conversion Rate:
Conversion rate is the percentage of deals getting converted by a sales rep out of the total leads assigned to them. This allows you the understand the efficiency of your reps. Many times, this number can surprise managers as the highest performing rep might not be the most efficient. And gives you the opportunity to rethink the lead assignment.
4. Lead Response Time:
Slow response to customer queries has the potential to throw the deal away. In fact, 53% of customers will rather not make a purchase than wait too long for a response. So, the salesperson who gets in touch with a lead as soon as it’s assigned has the chance of making the sale. Thus, lead response time is also an effective way to track sales rep performance.
Now that we’ve looked at the metrics that managers can use to efficiently measure team performance let’s move on to the next step. How can they improve sales rep performance?
Constant rejection from prospects, long calls, and hectic working hours make sales challenges. Losing lucrative deals even after facing all this can make a sales rep unhappy. In such scenarios, what steps do you take to improve their mood and performance?
1. Set Realistic (and Achievable) Sales Targets
Setting goals lays the foundation for your quarter, and your team’s performance depends on how effectively you assign goals to them.
When defining KPIs and targets for your team, you must ensure that you’re as specific as possible. The best strategy here is to bifurcate and align targets into weekly and monthly cadences so that the team is aware of their tasks and efforts without getting overwhelmed.
SMART work goes a long way: Your sales goals will not be practical if they are not SMART– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
2. On-the-job Employee Coaching
Regular check-ins can be conducive to maintaining a healthy relationship between a manager and her sales representative. To achieve this, try setting up frequent 1:1 sessions with each member of the sales department, as it will help them stay aware of your expectations without leading to misunderstandings and fallouts later. The most significant advantage of these one-on-one conversations is that your sales rep can get feedback at each stage of their sales lead journey.
3. Ensure a Collaborative Environment
The highest performing salespeople receive the biggest salaries. This makes them highly competitive and solitary creatures. While this breeds individual performance, it creates a toxic work culture and reduces team performance. It also makes it difficult for new team members to thrive. As managers, you must foster an environment of collaboration in your team. As per a recent study, more than 83% of high-performing teams leverage intra- and inter-team collaboration to thrive.
4. Go Beyond Incentives
Money can buy you happiness, but sometimes motivation comes beyond commissions and incentives. Motivate and encourage your sales reps with some quality rewards instead. For instance, if you want your sales reps to achieve a target, assure them that you and the entire sales department will accompany them on their favourite hobby or sport. It not only gives your sales reps external motivation but builds a sense of trust and belongingness that they seek.
Here’s how digital tools, like CRM, can improve your sales rep’s performance:
1. Effective Lead Management
Capture leads automatically by integrating lead generation platforms like Facebook, JustDial, and more with your Sales CRM. Assign them to your team members in a round-robin manner or by setting criteria like lead source, location, deal size, and more. Qualify captured leads directly on the platform and convert them into deals. Create single or multiple pipelines for your deals and convert them easily. A record of lost, won, and closed deals show you areas of improvement.
2. Automation
Set up workflow automation to minimize redundant tasks such as sending reminders, updates, invoices, etc., and free your sales teams to focus on closing deals. It also reduces the TAT for customer response and improves your customer’s experience with your business.
3. Personalize Conversations
Integrate your communication platforms such as SMS, Email, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more to manage all communication through a single platform. Maintain positive relationships with your clients by sending personalized offers and updates to their preferred platform. Record all conversations to give your customers contextual information in all future interactions.
Click here to learn how a Sales CRM, like Kylas, can improve your sales team’s performance. You can also schedule a quick demo if you want to hear from our experts.
Final Thoughts
Today, managers can succeed only by becoming leaders and facilitating their subordinates to perform better. Sales managers must establish mutual trust, respect, and credibility with their sales reps. They need to build empathy and understand their team’s concerns.
But, as always, there is a caveat.
They must continuously verify that their trust is not broken and take corrective steps if they see a team member take undue advantage. In case of doubt, they must trust hard data over their gut.
At the end of the day, sales is challenging. It comes naturally to some, others need training and encouragement to perform better, and some are not suited to it. As a manager, you must use data-backed insights to understand which of your team members falls into which category and help them accordingly.
To do this, do not hesitate to take the help of an intuitive enterprise-grade CRM, like Kylas. Get in touch with us to know more.
