How To Form An Excellent Sales Team In Your Company

While all aspects of a company are important, the sales team plays a particularly special role.

Without people devoted to improving sales and getting your products or services in front of the people who need them most, growth is going to be hard. For your business to thrive in the long run, you need to be making more sales. With that in mind, the following will explore a few things you can do to help form a stellar sales team for your company.

 

Let Them Use Your Product Or Service

People who have had direct experience with a product or service are far better at selling it than people who haven’t. If your sales team knows what it feels like to use your product, if they know the benefits that can be gleaned, they’re going to be better at expressing the unique qualities your product or service has to offer. 

Reduce Stressors

Sales, by nature, are incredibly stressful. There’s a quota or goal that needs to be met in a given period of time. There’s a constant chance of rejection. There’s repeated rejection and feelings of failure that come as a result. Your sales team doesn’t need any more stressors. Make sure that you can offer them a reliable wage, even if the commission is part of your payment schema. Make sure that you present them with healthy options for food, drink, and exercise, especially if they have to travel a lot for the job. It’s incredibly hard to stay healthy when you’re grabbing fast food to keep your expenses low and sleeping in gym-less hotels. Make sure that you offer benefits that protect their family and their financial situation should medical issues arise in their future. 

Beyond these basics, you want to avoid constantly interrupting them or micromanaging them. Make expectations clear and have pathways that are easy to use should your staff need further clarification or feel the need to suggest changes. Finally, avoid the temptation to catastrophize when things go wrong. The world is filled with enough crises. Don’t make daily work part of that.

Train, Train, Train

It’s hard to sell effectively when you’re not feeling confident. One of the best things you can do to help your sales team feel confident is to provide them with adequate training. Seek out procurement training for groups as well as communications training. Your staff should also have an intimate understanding of your service or product and the industry at large.

 

Combat Loneliness

Loneliness is terrible for people’s health, well-being, and job performance. Humans are pack animals, and this means that socializing is a need, not a want. It’s also a vital component of workplace satisfaction. Have sales team members do their work in pairs so that they always have someone to back them up if they feel stuck in a sales conversation. This also provides them with an outlet to vent about particularly difficult or problematic sales attempts with someone that understands exactly what they went through.

Pairing up sales team members can also help people’s strengths work together and cover for one another’s weaknesses. Every salesperson has areas where they excel and areas where they struggle. When they work together, you have a higher chance of presenting potential customers with people’s best qualities.

Support Rest And Sleep

Studies are extremely clear about the importance of rest and sleep for every aspect of human life. In 1910, the average American slept for nine hours each night. Nowadays, people are lucky if they get six.

When scheduling hours for staff, make sure they have enough hours between shifts for a proper night’s sleep. You also want to avoid rapidly making changes to your staff’s hours. If someone starts work at 10 am on Monday, 8 pm on Tuesday, and then 12 pm on Wednesday, you have a recipe for messed-up sleep schedules. Lack of sleep reduces work performance and harms people’s health. Pay special attention to this when staff is traveling as part of their sales approaches, particularly if time zones are being crossed.

Finally, you want to give staff adequate breaks. This is particularly important for roles in which people have to be “on” constantly like sales. They need to be sharp and focused, on their toes, and ready to react to whatever their leads say or do. This is incredibly draining. Make sure that breaks are encouraged.

The above information should help you build and care for a stellar sales team. In addition to all of this, you want to focus on staff satisfaction. This will help lower your turnover rates (sales have particularly high turnover rates because it’s so emotionally draining). The longer you keep staff, the more experienced they’ll be and the more sales you’ll make.