How to Build your Sales Team?

The sales team is one of the most important layers of an organization. It’s the part of the organization setting that requires adequate attention from the manager. Having a functional sales team is equivalent to more customers and prospects, which will, in turn, improve an organization’s revenue and accelerate the sales process in place. Customer conversion depends on the right customer conversation, and customer conversation depends on the right sales team.

With this in mind, you’ll learn in this post how to build a sales team for your sales organization.

What Is Sales Team?

A sales team is a group responsible for fulfilling an organization’s sales aspiration. It is headed by a sales manager with the responsibility to meet the sales expectation of a sales organization. Sales teams leverage various tools and technologies to expand the cycle of the organization’s customers and improve the brand of the products or services for the sales organization they represent.

Simple Tips On building A Sales Team

Here are 9 helpful tips to follow to create a functional sales team for your company:

#1. Hire the right people

Building a successful sales team starts with hiring the right people who are sales professionals to your team. Employing those who fit in the execution of the organization’s tasks is crucial to the growth of such organizations. In doing this, the employer needs to assess the company’s needs, values, and skills and hire employees based
on these components.

A sales manager should attract the right sales people to your organization through a detailed job description showing the skills and experience you want your potential sales team members to possess. Then take the ideal candidates with these components through an interview process to further screen them.

During the interview, the recruiting manager should have a scorecard on the ground to record the performance of the candidate being interviewed. Present the right candidates with a problem in sales that requires practical solutions. Or better still, inquires how they have solved a difficult situation in their previous place of work if they have any. This can be followed by an impromptu test, where they will be asked to draft a piece on how to convince a customer to see why their products or services are the best.

#2. Deliver memorable onboarding experience to them

Once the best ones have been recruited, an orientation or onboarding program should be organized to arm them with the relevant skills and sales resources needed to perform in their new workplace. This sales training will afford them all that is required to excel in their sales department.

You can also pair the newly recruited members with a more experienced sales professionals for proper guidance and mentoring.

#3. Build your team foundation on trust

In building a successful sales team, trust should be the foundation for the team. This will bind the department or team members together and thereby aid their task. Trust will make them see each other as a part that makes up the whole. This spirit of collectiveness positively impacts the productiveness of the salespeople and fosters positive teamwork.

It will help if you also encourage constant feedback in your team. One of the keys to a successful sales team is getting helpful information or criticism from the customer about the product or service you offer. This will help the sales team to detect the weaknesses and do the needful to amend them. Sales professionals should imbibe the culture of constant customer feedback as this can help them build a successful sales team.

#4. Set a realistic sales goals and expectations

As a sales manager, your operational objectives must be set and known to your sales team members. It would be best to break down your sales goals into achievable pieces to avoid counterproductivity.

Achieving full-blown objectives of an organization should be an incremental process. Incremental process means that once the goal’s first segment is achieved, you should add the second one. This will help sustain the morale of the sales representative across the board and improve their performances.

Clear goal setting will allow the organization to gauge their operational effectiveness as a team and know what to do if they cannot meet those objectives.

#5. Assess the performance of your sales team members

As part of improving your sales team, individual performance evaluation is necessary. As a sales leader, it’s your responsibility to evaluate your department members periodically to determine if they meet the organization’s set goals based on their assigned roles and responsibilities. You should also provide the results of this exercise to an individual member of your sales team post-assessment. This will reveal the area where your team members need to do better, giving room for improvement and necessary amendments.

For instance, try to understand your ‘sales macros.’ Most people are familiar with macros, or macronutrients, in the context of healthy eating. In that instance, you track how many carbs, proteins, and fats you eat to understand better what you’re consuming and help you reach your goals. This same thought process applies to sales.

#6. Get a sales coach or mentor for them

Sales are not always instinctive; it sometimes requires the guidance of a sales expert to have one’s footing. Mentors could be the experienced, veteran members of your sales team who teach other members (especially new hires or junior salespeople) everything that’s expected of them to function maximally.

Experienced sales professionals can make the new sales reps understand quickly what could have taken them a long time to understand if they were to understudy the sales process themselves. In building an effective sales team, periodic enlightenment by veteran sales professionals or experts should be duly sponsored by the sales organization to hone the skills of your sales team as a whole.

#7. Create a safe space for the team

A sales rep should have an open space for diverse opinions or ideas. In building a sales team, everyone should be granted the privilege to share their thoughts without fearing ridicule or dismissal. This will help the organization exploit the creativity of its members to achieve its sales goals. If a problem arises, there will be ground for a cross-mind discussion between the salespeople, and they will easily proffer a possible solution in no time.

#8. Hold meetings with the sales team regularly

There should be periodic meetings with each member of the sales team. This will help the sales manager know their performances, feelings, and perceptions about the task.

Sales managers can quickly detect the strength and weaknesses of their sales team members individually through one-on-one meetings. It will allow the company to motivate team members, tell them how crucial they are to the company’s growth, and hear their grievances.

In trying to understand what is holding someone back from reaching their goals, the right questions need to be asked to determine the underlying blocker to building a pipeline. Is it a motivational issue? Is it a time management issue? Or is it a skill issue?

The answers your sales reps give to these questions would determine the guidance, support, and coaching you provide to help them remove the blocker. With the blocker no longer an issue to worry about, you’re on your way to building a very strong and productive sales team needed to succeed as a sales organization.

#9. Develop a compensation plan and celebrate your sales team’s win

Every enterprise is filled with ups and downs, and the sales team as a department or unit is not excluded. Sales managers usually focus on the business’s downside, neglecting the sales rep’s little win.

Focusing on the downs of the business to improve it to the normal standard is crucial but not to the detriment of celebrating the rise in sales. An increase in sales performance, no matter how big or small it seems, should be celebrated because it has a bearing on the performance of the sales team as a body.

Members of the sales representatives shouldn’t feel reluctant to share their wins. This will be a motivating force for the team to do more. You should set certain compensation plans aside for members who performed extraordinarily to make them feel valued and their contributions more recognized.

Conclusion
Building a sales team is one of the best actions to improve an organization’s sales performance. In doing this, the right people with the relevant skills should be recruited, trained, motivated, and guided to meet the sales expectations. Building your sales team will become less difficult by taking inspiration from this article.

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