Tayyib Parrish 
It’s highly desirable for companies to have a sales team that performs really well. You can set and meet quotas with such a team, growing the company’s revenue.
Getting this team to function in an effective manner requires some planning ahead of time, deciding on key performance indicators (KPIs) and, importantly, good selection. But how do you achieve this? Some of the more important ingredients in creating an exceptional sales team.
Build a strong foundation
Creating teams that perform at their peak requires careful structuring. There are many factors that determine team success, such as the recruitment process and team design. It’s important that leaders are aware of these factors when building teams. If you want to be an effective manager, this step alone demands that you develop performance metrics that you will ultimately use to judge your team’s work – and that means figuring out exactly what’s important to them, how frequently their performance will be measured and so on. Establish a system of regular training and practice sessions so team members can flex with market fluctuation – adapting to product-pricing changes, or product-availability challenges – and converting them into truly helpful solutions, integrated when channels shift, as customers choose what’s right for them.
Create a culture of accountability
High-performance teams depend on having team members who hold each other accountable more than on having a direct, competitive, confrontational boss. When team members feel a sense of accountability to each other, they will make better efforts to work together and to do proper work in order to be an ethical business. Creating a culture of accountability means clarifying roles and responsibilities, creating open lines of communication, encouraging frankness, establishing trust, and routinely going back to goals and expectations with your team to keep everyone aligned. You should congratulate your team on wins and foster a notion of a sensible work-life balance, but you should also be giving them honest and constructive feedback on areas they can improve in. And you should make sure they can access all the resources available to them to optimise their success. Encourage your team to develop a growth mindset in how they view failure, where they see it as a learning opportunity that allows them to get that much closer to success.
Hire the right people
Top sales teams tend to share a lot of commonalities – including diversity. For example, their members tend to be high-quality, and in balance; they have a mix of not only generalists and specialists, but also hunters and farmers, outside and inside reps – all of whom know each others’ strengths and play to them. Making sure that every new hire has the skills, experience, and personality traits to build your team for success is part of your battle. In the subsequent steps of the process you will make sure you hire these ideal talent into those sales spots, by promoting a successful sales ecosystem through a good interview with situational and behavioral questions, along with a comprehensive job description for the ideal person to do the job. Every sale is successful because of the employees you hire.
Invest in technology
Structure can make all the difference to how sales teams hit their targets. Rather than waiting to hire rockstar sales staff in the hope that they will become superstars, create a holistic playbook for your sales team to ensure that they have every tool they need to excel – from product training and researching the market to creating sales processes and amending the solution to fit your customer’s individual needs. It is important to measure performance frequently to keep the teams accountable and motivated. This can also be very useful in business sale scenarios which includes sales dashboards providing snapshots of data, which can be quickly understood, to enable the key decisions and keep all the team members up and running. Employees should be transparent to each other and should provide positive, constructive feedback to help establish strong alliances at the work places, which in total help in creating successful sales groups that help in the expansion of the business.
Develop a sales strategy
A company’s sales strategy is a detailed description of the company’s approach to selling. This could include positioning, sales processes, sales techniques, goal setting, etc. A strong sales approach gives your team clarity and can be a useful management tool, allowing you to maximise opportunities and allocate resources more efficiently. It is also important to perform more general sales activity analyses as part of your business analysis. Collecting and analysing these data periodically can help you track your own sales activity to identify improvement areas, and can also help you to assess whether your strategy is working as intended. But if you want your sales team to soar to new heights and nail its revenue targets and goals, it goes without saying that investing time in creating an appropriate sales strategy for the organisation is fundamental. To learn more about winning sales strategies and how to build high-performing teams, read our go-to guide to the topic.
