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Hire
Before your hire anyone for your sales team you need to learn how to sell first. You need to check all of your hiring options and make sure you define your company culture. When hiring, especially for a sales position, you need to look for core attributes in a candidate. Key traits such as:
- Proven ability to learn quickly
- Positive attitude
- Ability to generate trust
- Competitive, determined, and proactive.
- Excellent communication skills, especially listening skills
- Passion, discipline, and energy.
It’s also important to focus on some “Don’t” factors. Such as:
- Don’t try to hire yourself, not everyone can be like you
- Don’t hire before you actually need someone
- Don’t pick based on sentiments
Think of a question to put them on the spot to test their sales skills such as “Sell me a bottle of water.” This technique has to been known to put candidates on the spot and test how they handle under pressure.
Coach
Coaching and training new staff isn’t always easy. The best way is to learn new tools and process to make it easier for you now and in the future. A few new tools could be e learning, rewards and commission bonus, and on field training with feedback. These are ways to help you analyze where your team needs work and help you grow quicker and more efficiently.
“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”
– Sir Richard Branson
You also have to remember that not everyone is coachable. Some people either don’t want to be there or don’t have the drive to better themselves. That’s just the harsh truth. If someone on your team is slowing you down or isn’t hitting goals. You need to be quick to let them go. Time is the most important thing in the sales world, and it’s worth a lot. Learn to know the difference between someone who has the drive to learn and someone who does not.
Monitor
A good way of monitoring your team’s sales is using the “Leads” application on Odoo. The lead management tool allows you to store the info for each company and/or person that you meet. Think of it as a digital Rolodex, except this “rolodex” can actually organize your sales pipeline, and schedule future follow-ups and meetings. For example: Lets say you find a potential lead online for someone who needs a service like yours. You call them and they respond by saying “I’m not ready for it yet, call me back in 2 weeks” Now unless this is your only lead and you’re sitting by the phone waiting for the sale, you are probably busy and might forget to call back. The scheduling function on Odoo sets reminders so you will never miss out on a lead again. To learn some more about the leads application from Odoo.
Monitoring your team is essential to track how each individual salesperson is doing and to track sales growth. These are 2 essential components when monitoring a sales team.
Improve
Not everyone is going to hit your exact sales targets right away. It takes time and it takes patience. A good way to boost morale and motivate your team is setting monthly quotas. For example, if you’re monthly quota per salesperson is $10,000 a month, the assigned goals should look like this:
- Month 1: $1500
- Month 2: $4000
- Month 3: $6500
- Month 4: $10,000
When you’re first building your sales team you might not have a lot of room in the budget. That’s okay. As your team grows and your sales increase, start to consider the thought of giving your team a base salary.
You want to make sure your team isn’t worried about their next check. Having a commission only based salary allows your team to start getting competitive with their team and could cause issues. It is better off to have your team focusing on next deals and not how much their next check is.
It’s also important to communicate with your staff. It’s better to over communicate then to not in the case of a sales emergency. Some good ideas for communication within the work team could be.
- Weekly Meetings (Group Calls or 1-on-1’s)
- Team retreats
- Daily e-mails
- Motivational text messages and emails
Lastly, never stop training. Whether you’re a senior sales person or a beginner. You should be using any free time during the workday to bettering your performance. Some of these things can be watching how others are selling (call shadowing), reading books, and learning how to discover new leads on your own.
Now that you know some tips and tricks to building a great sales team, get out there and put it to work! If you need help organizing your team or are looking for a software to integrate your leads and sales, contact Syncoria for a free demo of our system where we can also set you up with a free lead management tool free of charge.