Manage Your Sales Team to Close More Leads
What sales manager isn’t looking for ways to increase revenue for their business? The best way for you to increase the amount of money coming in is to take the leads in your sales pipeline and find a way to convert more of them. Closing leads is your best chance at generating more revenue, and it’s also your sales team’s best chance to make more money for themselves. It’s a win for everyone involved in the process and it starts at the top. So how exactly can you manage your sales team to close more leads? Let’s dive in.
Your responsibilities as a sales manager
As the sales manager, it’s your responsibility to set expectations, give feedback, and provide general guidance for your team. Ultimately, you are responsible for a great deal of the success and failure of an organization. You will be the one to plan and budget for your team to meet sales expectations, coming up with strategies to meet these expectations, and developing an overall voice for reps to take on when selling your product.
Manage your sales team
You are managing the sales team, but it takes more than just yourself to make the whole process successful. You need the support of your team. This means you have to support them in return and have their back when giving them direction. Create SMART goals that will provide the guidance needed for your sales team to succeed. Also, put in place a bonus structure that is going to motivate your sales reps to sell and to sell well.
Motivating team members is probably the most integral part of your job as a sales manager. Not only does it improve the results of each individual rep, but it also helps you to retain more sales reps in an industry where turnover is increasingly present. Constantly having to replace departed sales reps ultimately costs your company money and increases downtime. This is time that could be spent producing and converting more leads.
Hire and Everboard the right reps
Touching more on sales rep retention, hiring the right reps for your team is going to significantly reduce turnover. You want to find skilled reps, but more importantly you need to find those who are hungry to sell, and motivated to sell your product in particular. Take time during the vetting and interview process to seek those candidates who express a passion for sales and a willingness to continue learning. Too many seasoned sales reps think they know everything there is to know about selling. The truth is though, each company has their voice they need to convey to leads in order to bring in the most beneficial customers for their business. Make sure the reps you hire are able to buy into this fact and are willing to change their ways if necessary to better fit the overall goals of your business.
Harping back to the learning aspect of sales, everboarding should always be a part of your sales process. The continuation of learning is something that should be present in every aspect of life, and sales is no exception. Constant coaching brings more relevant knowledge to the table for your team. In particular, realtime sales coaching is going to give your reps more confidence to sell and they will seem more competent to your leads. You will start seeing these leads convert into customers at a much higher rate when you have the strategies in place to everboard your reps, keeping them as competent as possible in their sales interactions.
Make success easy
At SalesTalk Technologies, we are advocates for having the right information, at the right time, for every single sales interaction. It makes your reps more effective in their efforts to close leads. There’s no reason to make a difficult job more difficult by withholding the relevant information for sales interactions.
Using sales enablement tools makes it easy for reps to sell. It takes the guesswork out of selling and provides them easy access to the information and content that is proven to be successful for your client-base. Through evolving technology, we have the ability to give our reps more data and create more effective sales playbooks than we ever have before. Make it easy to close more leads and give your team the tools they need to do this for you.
Provide CRM
Customer relationship management tools should be a part of every sales machine looking to close more leads. Sales is the building of relationships - at least, effective sales adopts this theme. Dealing with the amount of people you deal with on a daily, monthly, and quarterly basis can get overwhelming. So again, make it easy on your sales team. Use CRM related technology to take all of the countless interactions your team makes and organize it in a way that will serve to benefit their efforts.
It's becoming more and more apparent that sales enablement technology, like CRM software, is creating more success for businesses. According to a 2018 study, organizations that utilize a dedicated sales enablement strategy is up to 61%. The benefits of controlling the chaos that is sales is obvious. There is so much information to draw from, and customer relationships are a part of this. Give yourself the tools you need to properly manage all of this and provide your team a less convoluted method of closing more leads.
Coaching your sales team members
What happens to a sales team without proper and consistent coaching? Development becomes non existent with new hires, your weakest sales reps remain at the bottom of the sales chain, and your leads never evolve into customers. Investing time and effort into your sales reps only results in positive outcomes. Without coaching, your sales performances will suffer and you will continue having a hard time closing leads.
It’s obvious to all sales managers that the onboarding and training process is a must for new hires. But what about after this time is complete? Chances are your reps will forget a lot of the information they learned during their onboarding process. Coaching and constant training eliminates this issue from the equation. Even the best sales reps need to have a perpetual flow of information coming their way. There’s no one out there who has the answer to every question a lead may have for them. Using sales enablement software that provides opportunities for real time coaching is going to yield positive results for your team’s sales efforts. Inevitably, you will start to see more of those leads turn into customers.
Set clear goals (and reward those that are met)
We’ve talked previously about how important it is to set goals for your team. It provides valuable direction, structure, and motivation that helps your reps close more leads. It’s important for these goals to be clear to the team in what it takes to reach them. Being open with and having that line of communication available to your team is needed in order for the goals you set to be attainable.
You’re the sales manager and you set the course for your team. If your team doesn’t know exactly where they’re going, they’re inevitably going to get lost along the way. Clear goals not only allow you to provide an obvious picture of what you expect with their efforts, but also provides sales momentum and a more efficient route of realizing potential.
What are the benefits of a well-managed sales team?
The key to your success as a business is the success of your sales team. As the captain of this ship, you need to set the precedent for success and give them the tools they need to reach the point of success. There are so many benefits to a well-managed sales team. Let’s discuss a few of them.
Increased revenue
Naturally, with effective leadership comes increased production. It cannot be overstated how much a clear, thought out strategy will benefit sales interactions. With more productivity, more leads will be brought into the sales machine, and you’ll have a better chance at closing more of those leads. With more prospects comes more opportunity for new customers, which equals more revenue for your business. It’s a no-brainer.
Organized sales efforts
Properly managing your team means you are creating a structure and foundation for your team to stand on. If there isn’t an organized effort, everyone is using different strategies, some that work and some that don’t. No one will be on the same page and they won’t be able to learn from each other’s successes and failures. Being able to organize and properly distribute information and content to your team is going to bring more order to the sales process, which will help your team be more effective in their efforts to close.
Increased confidence, competency, and efficiency
With the right leadership, your sales team is going to shine. They will have the confidence that their company has their back and know that, at a moment’s notice, they will have access to the information they need to make a sale. Also, they’re going to be more competent when in the midst of a sales interaction. Having the answers they need to appease a prospect and nurture them from lead to customer is what it’s all about for reps. Give them that luxury by managing your team properly. With this increased confidence and competency, you will see efficiency in closing leads. Sit back and enjoy watching your customer base continually increase.
Empower your sales team to close more leads with SalesTalk Sales Enablement Technology
At SalesTalk, we want to make your life easier as a sales manager. It’s our goal to help you manage your team better so that you can close more leads for your business and continue to keep those customers happy. We offer you a whole suite of Sales Enablement tools to help accomplish this.
Through tools like Coaching4U™, What2Know™ and What2Say™, you have what you need to keep the learning process going through the entirety of a rep’s time with your company. It will help you to always have the content that will make their sales interactions be more effective and naturally help them close more leads. Request a demo of our industry leading technology. Start closing more leads today with SalesTalk Technologies.