Your company has decided that in order to raise revenue, it is essential to bring in new customers. You’ve just hired a team of sales professionals and you want to keep them on task. The good news is, when you hire a great salesperson, their productivity increases. Here are 5 ways you can help your sales team reach its goals by the end of 2022.
Hire dedicated sales/revenue professionals
The first and most important way to help your sales team in 2022 is to hire a dedicated revenue operations expert.
If you want to be successful in your business, you need someone who can analyze essential sales metrics, automate various processes, and effectively coordinate the actions of all departments within the company.
By implementing the "revenue operations" model, you will streamline many processes at once: from acquiring new customers to retaining existing ones.
A dedicated revenue operations specialist will help keep your business on track toward success by improving the efficiency of your sales team.
Invest more in training and onboarding
Training and onboarding are vital to sales team performance, as they help reps improve their skills and retain more information. In fact, sales teams that focus on training during onboarding outperform their peers by 35% in the first year. But many sales organizations aren't offering comprehensive programs — just 27% of organizations offer a formal onboarding program, and 38% of reps say their sales training is inadequate.
To set your reps up for success, invest in both onboarding and ongoing training. You should have a clearly defined process for each rep's first few months on the job — one that covers everything from product knowledge to effective use of CRM software. And as you add new features or launch new products, offer additional training sessions to ensure reps are prepared to talk about them with clients.
The better trained your reps are, the more confident they'll feel when interacting with prospects. This improves the quality of customer interactions and ultimately leads to increased revenue for your business.
Have sane quotas
As a manager, you know the importance of sales team motivation. But when you're in the middle of a quarter and your reps are falling behind quota, it can be hard to know where to start.
Here are four ways to help your team hit their number, even when they seem completely off track:
Have sane quotas. One of the biggest demotivators for sales teams is unrealistic quotas. If you want your reps to meet their goals and hit the bonus pool, give them a quota they can actually reach in a given period. This is easier said than done — and many companies still struggle with this — but if you want motivated reps who aren't burned out by the end of every quarter, it's critical that you get it right.
Communicate progress toward quota. The best way to avoid burnout is to maintain motivation throughout a quarter or year. That means making sure your reps know exactly how they're doing toward hitting their numbers. You don't want a situation where someone thinks they're right on track until the last few days when it turns out that their quota was unattainable all along — that's a recipe for disappointment and resentment. Make sure everyone knows exactly where they stand at all times with regular check-ins and updates on the whole sales process.
Upgrade alignment between Customer Success, Account Management, and Sales
Salespeople will be more interested in selling to customers who have high customer lifetime value and renew their subscription year over year.
With this mindset, sales teams will thrive when they are more aligned with customer success and account management functions, so customer success and account management teams can help close deals for upsells.
Customer Success can help sales by identifying expansion opportunities with existing customers. These growth opportunities may originate from internal stakeholders (e.g., customer success managers) or from external stakeholders (e.g., customers).
External stakeholders:
Customers may reach out to Customer Success to ask for a new feature, or express a need that your product does not currently fulfill. In such cases, Customer Success can pass the request onto the Product team for consideration during their next round of product updates. If the feature is already implemented but requires a larger plan, Customer Success can pass along the opportunity to Sales as an upsell opportunity if the customer is willing to pay (or has expressed interest in spending more).
Internal stakeholders:
Customer Success Managers may notice that some of their customers have underutilized licenses or have expressed interest in using certain features but aren’t quite ready yet. In such cases, Customer Success Managers can inform their Sales counterparts about these scenarios to help support the process.
Celebrate the wins more.
Salespeople can be notorious for their egos. They want to succeed and be recognized for that success.
Sales leaders should celebrate the wins more. This is a simple way to boost morale, motivation and loyalty among team members, but it's something many sales leaders simply don't do. If a rep makes an important sale or hits a big quota, tell them about it in a public way. Praise them in front of their colleagues. Make sure they know how much you appreciate their efforts. This doesn't have to be anything elaborate — even just saying "thank you" will go a long way — but team members want recognition of their accomplishments, so giving it to them will help them feel good about what they do and make them want to work harder going forward.
There are many ways sales leaders can help salespeople be successful, but the ones above are among the most critical and usually have the biggest impact on performance. The better your reps perform, the better your team performs — and the better your bottom line looks at the end of each quarter or year.
There are always challenges to overcome. Implementing a new initiative is no different. But with a solid plan of action and careful preparation, your goals will be met. Good luck on reaching 2022 with your sales team intact and ready to succeed!