Featured

Sales Management Training: 9 Keys to Building a High-Velocity Sales Team



Published
Be sure to register for my free training on, "The 7-Step Formula to Closing More Deals without the Price Pushback, 'Think-It-Overs' or Ghosting" https://salesinsightslab.com/training/

1. Scalable offering.

One of the most important sales management training ideas is the concept of putting a product in place that essentially sells itself in some ways. Now, obviously, many products or services are either invisible or commonly available, which makes it hard to literally throw them out into the market to sell on their own. But it’s up to you as the sales manager to do the legwork to make that product or service as saleable as possible. That way, your sales team is starting with an advantage. Making sure your offering is scalable is the number one way to give your sales team an edge from the start, setting them up for high-velocity selling.

2. Career progression.

Creating an environment where you have true career progression on display is one of the keys to building a high-velocity sales team. This way, if reps are really successful in their role, they know they can move on to become a sales manager, a director, a VP—or whatever it is. Fostering obvious career progression will allow you to hire top-performing talent at the lower levels. People who start out at your organization in a sales entry-level position can prove themselves, learn about your company, master your processes, and then develop into high-performing salespeople.

3. Right people.

One of the most critical sales management training credos is that you must have the right people in the right roles. This might sound obvious, but sales managers and sales leaders say to me all the time, "Oh man, I just can't get my people to really close deals. I have no idea why." My first reaction is always to ask, “Well, do you have the right people in the right roles in the first place?" It often turns out that they don’t.

4. Align incentives.

One of the biggest barriers to creating a truly high-velocity sales team is lack of alignment. What I mean by that is, if we don't have clear alignment between what the company wants to accomplish, and why and how salespeople are rewarded for their efforts, then we're not going to be successful. Aligning incentives is the backbone of any successful sales management training initiative.

5. Lead gen.

This may sound trite, but sales teams will struggle without a lead generation process in place. Lead gen can look very different at different organizations. It could be that you have a business development team whose sole job is to schedule appointments for your closers. Or maybe you just have a really strong marketing group that can also schedule appointments for your closers. But what we don't want to do in today's world of selling is ask closers to generate their own leads.

6. Sales process.

When you teach your sales team the same proven sales process to follow, you know that they're out there having the types of conversations you want them to have. And ultimately, you're all speaking with the same vocabulary. When a sale doesn't go well, you’ll have the right vocabulary to understand whether those salespeople did what they really should have done in any particular situation. This all starts by having an organizational sales process in place.

7. Organized system.

The key here is to organize all of the systems in place at your sales organization—not just the CRM. What system are you using for your cold email outreach? What system are you using for your phones? How does all of it organize into one smooth stack of technology that allows your salespeople to do as little operational and administrative work as possible? Answer these questions and you can make sure your sales team is ultimately laser-focused on what you want them to do: sell.

8. Coaching.

The number one activity that any sales manager can do is coach. If you’re not consistently coaching your reps, then you're not really doing your job as a sales leader. Coaching typically involves using some technologies, such as call recording or Zoom recording, to record each team member’s sales interactions. Then, you should be taking your reps through a process of actually watching or listening to themselves on the recording.

9. Accountability.

Accountability ties together all the pieces of sales management training that we’ve been talking about so far. Having strong accountability processes in place is the best way to hold reps accountable to what you want them to do— having the types of conversations you want them to have, doing the type of sales activity you want them to do, sending out enough proposals, or moving prospects through the sales pipeline as quickly as they need to be.
Category
Management
Be the first to comment