Sales teams in most organizations have always been composed of individual people, that have worked on their own within a team unit to compete with each other to get the highest number of sales. Times are changing and businesses are rethinking their strategies in order to enrich how their services or goods are represented in the marketplace.

While sales people can perform well if they work alone, they can become much more productive if they are paired into groups as an actual team. The ultimate goal is productivity and customer satisfaction, not which salesperson can outdo the other. Pairing salespeople into groups will blend their individual unique skills to fully enhance their abilities to create valuable solutions by understanding customer needs and presenting attractive solutions to customers problems. Surprisingly, this approach works much more than it fails.

 

Below are 7 secrets of a happy sales team

 

Make Sure Your Team is Complementary

When you are grouping your sales teams together, make sure that their skills complement each other. If all of your team members have product knowledge, but no social skills, then you are going to have a problem. Creating a dynamic team where all members have unique skills will keep the team harmonious and productive.

 

Leader Involvement

If sales teams are working to pitch products or services relentlessly, while their leader is hiding in an office drinking a cappuccino on a regular basis, then the sales team probably won’t be receptive. Leaders have to lead by coaching and facilitating to inspire their teams. If a sales team knows that their leader is willing to pitch in, then they will be much happier overall.

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Communication & Collaboration

For a sales team to be effective, they have to respect each other. The idea is to blend their strengths to create a powerful sales force. Communicating openly and collaborating together is essential if businesses expect their sales teams to excel.

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Break the Competitive Barriers

Many companies have contests where their sales staff members compete against each other on sales performance. This can cause real friction within the sales team, if those at the bottom feel inadequate. This type of scenario does not give sales staff incentives to work as a team, because then they would be hurting their own position. Shifting the main focus to overall team performance will keep sales teams much happier.

 

Allow Sales Staff to Have a Voice

Sales personnel’s input could be valuable to improving overall sales productivity. Team member engagement boosts morale, to where they feel like they are valuable. People who feel valued perform much better than those who don’t, and they are much happier with their jobs.

 

Recognition Goes a Long Way

Everyone wants to be patted on the back for their achievements. It’s human nature. Recognizing your sales staff members for good performances will keep them happy and inspire them to continue to do a great job. If they feel like they aren’t getting any recognition at all, then they will probably not be as productive.

 

Advancement

If sales team members feel like they have the opportunity to improve their careers through coaching, supervising, or in other positions, then they will be much more focused and driven, knowing that they have a goal to work towards. If their position has no opportunity for advancement, then they may end up feeling as if they are trapped in the position. Rewarding sales members for their efforts by promoting from within will keep their morale elevated.

 

Keeping a sales team happy isn’t hard to do, but the methods that actually work will vary from company to company. It really just depends on what resources each individual company has. However, even though they may be implemented differently, the things that keep sales teams happy are universal. Learn the secrets of a happy sales team and watch your productivity and profits soar.

Learn the secrets of a happy sales team and watch your productivity and profits soar.

A great sales team…

• Compliments Each Other
• Has A Great Leader
• Communicates Effectively
• Does Not Compete Against Itself
• Is Listened To
• Is Recognized
• Has Opportunities To Advance

 

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Sales Recruiting: How To Hire & Retain A Players To Drive Revenue For Your Sales Team

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5 Sales Talent Recruitment Strategies To Build A Sales Dream Team

 

Doug Dvorak is a certified speaking professional and sales coach that motivates teams and individuals across the nation. Team building programs and keynotes are available upon request.

Finding that individual who embodies the passion and drive you are seeking can be difficult. So, how can you weed out those who will eventually pull your team down and find the winning attributes of a sales champion? Here are five answers to everyday sales challenges and to help you avoid them.

1. Effective Recruitment Strategies

The first challenge anyone faces in sales management is the effective recruitment and training of new employees. There is a huge difference between someone who is looking for a sales job because they think they might be good at it and someone who has a passion for selling. Find the person who shares the same enthusiasm that you do. Remember to pay and reward them well. You won’t be sorry. Consider working with The Sales Coaching Institutes sales recruitment specialists to help you hire a sales dream team

Related Article: How To Hire And Retain A Players To Drive Revenue For Your Sales Team

Related Article: 5 Sales Talent Recruitment Strategies to Build a Sales Dream Team

2. Creating Structure that Produces Results

The second challenge many hiring and sales managers encounter is not creating a structure and regular measures for achieving accountability. Just leaving your sales personnel to find ways to bring in new customers is a sure way to be surrounded by unmotivated and unsuccessful people. Keep your sales force engaged and productive with manageable goals. Whether it’s monthly meetings, daily pep talks or emailed product updates, formulate the best strategies to keep your sales force engaged and producing results. Take an active rather than a passive role in ensuring your employees have the best tools to achieve strong results.

3. Recognition Is Crucial

The third challenge involves the all-important task of recognizing a sales superstar. Making your employees feel valued and appreciated is one of the strongest reinforcing behaviors you can include in your management portfolio. An employee who is recognized and rewarded is a salesperson who will continue to produce. There are many ways to make employees feel like they’ve done a great job. Employee lunches and gift cards to local favorites are just a few ways to reward your staff. This type of motivation is infectious, and other employees will want to enjoy the same success as their co-worker.

4. Effective Compensation Gets Results

Your fourth challenge is deciding how to formulate a pay structure that works for you. Compensation plays a large role in driving behavior within your sales team. Will you pay your sales force with a base pay along with commission, salary alone or completely commission? The Sales Coaching Institute offers great advice and programs dedicated to Sales Compensation Strategies that can help you develop sales compensation programs that will boost morale and sales. Strong salespeople often prefer commission only as they determine their salary based on their performance. If your salesforce is happy with just a salary and you do not see results, you will quickly learn that the pay structure is not working for you. Find a plan that motivates employees and produces results.

5. The Importance of a Cohesive Team

While your sales employees are the individuals engaging your customers and bringing in new clients, they are only part of your business goals. Your fifth and ultimate challenge is bringing the corporate team together in a way that produces cohesive results. When your marketing department, sales force and management shares effective strategies and implements successful business models, the end result is a selling strategy that works. Consider using team building strategies or working with a team building specialist to bring your team closer together. Connected and teams that respect each other produce more than individuals. Everyone has something unique they can bring to the table and they need to know how to communicate with one another effectively to produce results. Doug Dvorak is a team building specialist, view some of this team building programs here http://www.dougdvorak.com/keynotes.

Related Article: Doing More With Sales Teams

Use the resources provided above and the above 5 answers to avoid everyday sales challenges to help your sales team reach the next level of success.

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Most people focus on their strengths in leadership because it allows them to help others and create an efficient team. However, when you overuse those strengths, they can start to become weaknesses, creating problems like micromanaging. Therefore, it’s important for managers and other leaders to understand which strengths can turn into weaknesses and how to prevent this from happening.

Constantly Stress Results

Results are a necessary aspect of sales, but when you focus primarily on results and relentlessly try to maximize output or increase production, you may start micromanaging your team. Micromanagement is where you start to become obsessed with minute details, stand over the person, or tell them what to do/how to do it. This can undermine operations and reduce morale. It’s necessary to focus on results, but it’s also important to balance goal orientation and direction by delegating tasks appropriately.

Too Much Humor/Wit

Humor and wit are excellent ways to lighten up a stressful situation and to start connecting with your team or group. You must have a strong sense of social awareness and self to help you understand when humor is an appropriate motivator. Otherwise, your levity may make others feel dumb or that they don’t need to be serious. Overusing your humorous side can also lead your team to believe that you don’t take your job seriously or don’t take them seriously.

Always Requesting a Consensus

The term consensus means to bring others into the decision-making process. This leadership tactic works well and creates a bond between management and employee. However, it can be a time-consuming problem in some situations. It’s best to use the consensus technique when you have a serious decision that will affect everyone. Otherwise, choosing a more consultative approach is usually best. When consensus is necessary, adopt a strategy that allows everyone to voice their opinion without taking too much time away from sales and other obligations.

These are just a few examples, but most other sales leadership strengths can create weakness in an organization when overused. A great sales leader knows how to balance their leadership strengths and uses them at the right time when they have the largest and most beneficial impact on their team. Learning how to balance your leadership strategies is one of the best ways to improve your overall leadership skills. You already know what your leadership strengths are, you just need to know how to balance them and you can improve you leadership abilities.

 

Related Article: 6 Steps To Becoming an Effective Sales Leader

There are many elements that are essential to not only having a good sales team but to developing and sustaining a top sales team. A strategic approach and knowing where and why you should insource or outsource specific sales positions and management opportunities is all part of the equation. Knowing the benefits of outsourcing sales versus insourcing sales can be crucial to your organization’s growth and success.

The Benefits of Insourcing Sales

Insourcing, or hiring from within the organization or through your own hiring team for new recruits and candidates, offers the company the greatest in possible control over the entire process.

A report from the Whitehouse from January 2012 titled “Investing in America: Building an Economy That Lasts”, takes a big picture and very detailed look at the increased hiring in the private sector, resulting the addition of 2 million jobs across the country in 2011 with the trend predicted to continue.

This trend has continued, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that 2.45 million jobs were added in the United States in 2015. However, this really hasn’t created a dent in the talent available with many qualified, experienced and highly effective sales professional out of work or underemployed.

When sales positions are posted and a company receives applications from talented and qualified candidates, insourcing makes good business sense. Through this process employees already fully trained in the business model and with solid product knowledge and experience can move into sales positions and also be maintained, trained and evaluated for potential moves up the corporate ladder.

This is one of the most critical factors to consider. When a business has a pool or stockpile of current sales professionals able to move into more advanced positions in team management, to take on lead in-house sales roles and to develop a solid network of qualified leads, the business and the employee both win.

The employee on the sales team sees and understands the potential for advancement which motivates them to continue with their professional development and leadership skill development. The company, in turn, has a long period of time to evaluate all employee skill levels, leadership potential and ability to work within the business model and achieve the individual and team goals.

In other words, with insourcing, there is a very low risk in promoting people up through the ranks of the sales team and even into management positions. The company also has full control over the training of the individuals, which can include cross-training for different positions within the sales team to provide a team that can function even through unforeseen issues should a critical team position be left vacant.

It may even be easier to think of the benefits of insourcing as having a farm team. Talent can be mentored, trained and evaluated across real-world experiences and situations before a promotion or a move is offered. Sales recruiting is key to attracting top talent that can be mentored and trained as specialists in your industry.

Additional Benefits of Insourcing Sales

There are other benefits to consider with insourcing of in-house sales positions that include:

• Direct supervision and support – when the sales team is present and under your management, there is immediate feedback available, support when atypical issues arise, and full supervision of the team by a manager from the company.

• Collaboration potential – problem solving and innovative ideas are more easily generated with the use of in-house teams. The ability to identify challenges or potential issues and develop workarounds that conform to the company policies or that are used to create new policies gives you full control over how these situations are addressed. Since management can be easily brought into the discussion, sales staff are more likely to understand they have a voice at the table and a vested interest in working to resolve the issue.

• Specializations – often outsourcing companies have the same challenges as any business in finding highly specialized types of sales employees and managers. When a company has these specialized positions, hiring from within may actually be faster than trying to find an outsourcing company offering those specific skill sets in a cost-effective way. The argument for insourcing is solid, and it is one that is used across all departments in a company, not just in sales. Developing top company trained and experienced staff for sales or sales management and leader.

 

The Benefits of Outsourcing Sales

Outsourcing sales is a way to bring in new blood, new ideas, new energy and even new possibilities to any company sales team. However, it is not always the right option for every company and business, and it needs to be carefully considered as there can be many benefits of outsourcing sales. However, making the decision to outsource sales staffing is not a simple task. There may be multiple options that make it difficult to insource these jobs, and it may be very challenging to vet potential candidates and get them in place, through the onboarding process and ready to start selling in the necessary window of time. Below, we outline the benefits of outsourcing sales.

In general outsourcing of sales teams makes good business sense when:

• Time is of the essence – for startups and new businesses, or established businesses changing their business model or going through new product launches, outsourcing provides a very quick transition to a fully trained, experienced and cohesive sales team.

• Lack of qualified candidates – sometimes, despite those 250 resumes per job opening, you are unable to find the correct candidates for the job. When you have multiple positions to fill or are adding a sales team or restructuring a sales department this lack of qualified candidates can create significant challenges that may have a very large financial impact on the company.

• Loss of qualified talent – in a survey by Glassdoor for Employers it was found that 46% of those defined as Millenials left their job because of a perceived lack of opportunity for career growth. To add to this 65% of this same group were highly skeptical of the promises made by employers, and were more likely to change jobs for an opportunity for advancement, even if a lower base salary was offered. When companies are constantly losing qualified talent, it is very challenging to develop an effective inside sales team. With an outsourced sales team, this is a non-issue as the sales staff has their own internal progression or advancement model. These 4 professionals are also not as susceptible to heavy recruitment from the competition, creating a more stable sales workforce for short or long-term deployment with the company.

• Failing to meet goals – this is a complicated process that can include poor performance on the part of the sales team as well as incorrect metrics developed or the inside sales team. In a report by memoryBlue, many companies over or underestimate the metrics they use as they related to industry averages. This can include the number of calls made per sales rep, the amount of sales or other factors. With an outsourced sales team, the sales model will already include these metrics, providing more accurate information and a clear picture of performance.

• Management support – with the services offering outsourced inside sales teams it is also possible to bring in management with the team. This can be a terrific option for a smaller company or a startup, allowing the in-house management team to train and develop until they are ready to assume the leadership roles. When transforming a sales team changing management strategy and skill set may also be an important consideration and this option allows for that time, training and experience working with a proven professional. A great example of Management Support is working with a Virtual Vice President of Sales.

Additional benefits of outsourcing sales can include top companies providing support to the in-house management team to work with B2B sales companies to hire, onboard and develop protocols for creating the insourced sales and management team that will eventually take over. This places the outsourcing company in the role of both a consultant as well as a mentor, literally training and developing the replacement in-house team in the same effective model they are using. Metrics and analysis methods in tracking team effectiveness and success can be further refined to accurately reflect the needs of the company.

Outsourcing sales is typically considered a temporary option for most companies, but the duration of the service can be months to years. While it is difficult to find specific statistics on outsourcing inside sales, in the United States alone in 2013 Source Line Computer Economics reports that 2.6 million jobs were outsourced, with about 20% of companies reporting that the outsourcing was done to transform and/or reorganize internally. In addition, about 9% of companies in the same survey reported the outsourcing was done to speed up the time to enter the market. While this survey was completed on outsourcing to different countries, many of these jobs were in sales and customer service.

You can also consider outsourcing digital marketing by working with a reputable SEO firm to bring in additional sales leads.