The new hybrid landscape of sales outreach, lead generation, and business development comes with unique challenges. For management, it has brought about the task of maintaining focus, efficiency, and motivation in their sales team.
Salespeople in the B2B space have seen drastic changes since the pandemic in how to sell products or services or software, and conduct business. It is now much harder to get hold of prospects. The length and number of touchpoints have increased and it is difficult to identify what a ‘normal’ sales process is anymore. It can be a challenge to keep your team motivated, on track, and focused to meet your sales goal.
As a B2B outsourced sales company, our salespeople are thriving. We’re securing hundreds of Sales Qualified Leads every week across multiple sectors through ongoing investment in people, training, and innovative technology. We’ve adapted and even managed to start up a new division.
We’ve grown as a company. But how?
Implementing some of the ideas detailed below has helped ensure our whole team is on track and focused. As a result, although the people we’ve found, hired, and mentored have varying experience, they all consistently perform in a challenging environment to achieve the best sales targets.
To achieve the same and refocus and motivate your sales team, it is recommended to review your company’s approach to the following things:
- Company expectations & corporate goals
- Personal goals
- Be results-driven
- Planning & time management
- Having honest conversations
- Work-life balance
Setting expectations & a sales goal is one of the most important things to motivate your sales team
Laying out the expectations of the team and each individual is fundamental. It is important for all in the organisation to understand the sales strategies. Otherwise, what are we working towards? It can be to easy to think that employees can turn up, make the calls, finish at 17:30 on the dot, and pay no attention to the overall goal. Getting the whole company to understand the importance of achieving your sales targets will fortify to drive to achieve your sales goals faster. Involve your team in the understanding what it means to miss a target and also what it means to improve your sales.
What outreach do you require?
All salespeople must understand how they can help you achieve your sales targets and need to be set realistic sales performance plans. The number of calls per day or meetings booked will feed into the success of hitting the gross profit target. Ensuring that the everyone knows how the teams performance will contribute to the team’s goals and those of the company, you ensure there are no grey areas. It enables the team to take action.
Not only will this give your sales team a clear understanding of what success looks like in your company, it highlights to your team what their personal main focus should be, giving all of their business a interactions meaning and drive.
While being upfront about corporate and company goals is essential, when it comes to motivating your team this may not be enough. When an individual has a monthly target, it can be easy to feel detached from a company’s overall ambition and lose sight of your personal contribution to long-term and wider goals. To remedy this, we get our sales team to set personal goals, tied to the KPIs set by our clients and linked to our own corporate strategy.
Personal goals will keep your sales team motivated more than any corporate goal you can think of
Knowing what your salesperson is working towards and helping them achieve it will mean more to them than anything else. A personal goal for for an individual might be: A new house? A holiday? To be promoted? Teaching their child to ride a bike? It is interesting to know what gets them out of bed in the morning.
Understand this and having that personal connection will provide a way to continually re-engage, and re-energise your team in their work. We have found this is a very effective way to motivate our own sales team. We ask each of them to share an individual goal with us, and in response show them how many top of the sales funnel activities they need to achieve what they want in life. You won’t believe how much better this works than simply saying “do more, start in earlier, work harder”.
Concentrate on the results of your sales activity to celebrate the importance of quality over quantity.
Be result focussed; too many companies micromanage the life out of a performing sales team
They’ll ask questions like: How many calls this hour? How long were the pitches? How many coffee breaks have you had today? Often, this can apply unhelpful pressure and stress to your sales team, which in turn can impact how effective their calls and outreach work is. Our sales experience show that at the end of the day 100 unhelpful enquiries aren’t worth anything compared with 5 relevant, high-quality sales leads.
If however, you have clear goals set out and they are being hit, as a sales manager, think about what you want from your salesperson:
- Do the set sales targets need to be higher?
- Are the set sales goals too high and unrealistic? Are they the right goals?
- Can you show them a clear plan of how doing more will help them achieve their set goals quicker?
- Is there an option for them to progress in-house, mentor, or train others around them?
This will ensure that the sales team’s members don’t become stagnant or demotivated in their work, feel valued, and keep driving forward to improve and grow, and develop new ways to achieve sales targets.
Follow a plan & provide time management guidance to reset the focus
It’s easy for salespeople to get side-tracked, and whilst they might have the best intentions, doing the same thing over and over again can become mundane. Especially if someone is already struggling with motivation and isn’t working towards any goals.
With every sales rep role there’s a minimum level of outreach required or a certain expectation of performance, but now and then colleagues are going to socialise. Whether it’s talking about sports or the latest series they’re watching, and how horrendous The Game of Thrones ending was, you should encourage building relationships within the team. However, too much of this makes it easy to fall behind on sales targets. If your company converts at a rate of 100 calls per sales qualified lead, it doesn’t matter whether you make them in a day or a week. You still require 100 calls to book one Sales Qualified Lead and achieving sales goals requires focus.
We have found that having a daily plan, like the below, has helped to focus individuals who are struggling to achieve their sales and make them responsible for their own time.
Honest conversations don’t have to be negative & can give someone the push they need
Being self-sufficient is an important attribute in the world of sales, even more so now most companies have adopted a hybrid working model. Therefore, making sure your team member feels confident and properly equipped to get the job done is in your best interest. Even the best salesperson in the world can have a bad week. We are only human, and expecting your team to perform at 110% every day isn’t realistic, there is a need to set realistic expectations. Showing some understanding of this can go a long way. Of course, your team can’t completely slack off every day. But, if you have noticed a drop off in someone’s performance, being open and approaching them from a place of care can help to turn the situation around.
First of all, check-in with them. Has something happened in their personal life? Are they unwell? Do they need a bit of a pep talk and confidence boost? “You never know what someone might be going through so be kind” is very relevant here.
Make sure you have a conversation with someone before you disciplining them down for not making enough calls, sales, or working hard enough. When things could have gone better for someone in your team, ensure you give constructive, actionable feedback. Lead the conversation with what they can learn going forward, and how this will help reach your sales plan to be successful in the future. Having this perspective will help your team to remain uplifted and motivated in challenging times to pick themselves up and go again.
In our own office, we see a huge benefit from creating a positive atmosphere, setting realistic sales goals and celebrating people’s successes. Especially if your company has remote workers, frequently demonstrating that they are a part of a team who champion each other keeps the team spirit and motivation alive.
A good work-life-balance will avoid burnout & ensure your team are fresh and ready for work
While we have all spent a lot of time at home over the last couple of years, giving your team the right work-life balance is essential to keep your team engaged and happy at work. Most would agree that working from home has benefited a lot of people. From reducing their commute times each week to having more hours to get solitary tasks done. Moreover, there have been huge campaigns for people to take care of their mental health, with a poor work-life balance being a major component contributing to overall stress. As the great Zig Ziglar said:
“I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can’t truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is a shambles”.
Without the right downtime, people will eventually become fatigued and stressed. Mistakes start to happen and you’ll miss important sales targets. You want your team to have the right frame of mind to help them reach success inside and outside of work.
As a B2B sales outreach company, a key benefit for our clients is the time required to manage a sales team becomes our responsibility. With this extra time, compared with having an in-house sales team, management can put their energy back into the areas of their business they may have been neglecting.
This way, companies can focus on how to grow their business. Meanwhile, the sales leads needed to close business and make moves in your industry roll in, ready for your sales pitch.