3 Things a High-Performing Sales Team Needs to Succeed
Highlights
A high-performing sales team is one that continues to strive for excellence, even after they’ve already “won.”
Three things that separate a high-performing sales team from others is the creation of a sales plan, consistent skills development, and the use of sales data in decision making.
If your team is already operating at a high level, you may feel like they’ve reached the ceiling of possibility. But a stellar business strategy is never about resting on your laurels once a goal is met — it’s about moving the goalpost, doubling down on what’s working, and improving what’s not, to enable even higher performance. This is the critical difference between a high-performing sales team and a team that’s par for the course.
Sales success has always been about more than the products you offer. From retail to services and beyond, sales teams operate as much on an intuitive understanding of their customers as they do on offering them top-quality products and solutions.
You might be surprised to learn that intuition can be mechanized and concretized, which means it’s repeatable and improvable. Here are three strategies for taking your already-intuitive, high-performing sales team to the next level.
1. Create and Implement a Sales Plan
A sales plan, which lays out an organization’s sales strategy with a clear end goal and time frame, is an excellent way to keep everyone on the same page. It includes specific smaller objectives and sales processes along an overarching timeline that leads toward the ultimate revenue goal, and offers strategies, resources, and tasks for achieving each objective.
This master document clarifies your revenue goals and enables a top-performing sales team to plan ahead, giving them direction and purpose and limiting any time spent wondering what the next step should be. It not only ensures that everyone on your team has the same understanding of your sales goals, but also allows them to work together along the same path toward meeting those goals.
As with any element of business, the aim is to create repeat success — which means knowing what led to your success in the first place. Thus, as new best practices and sales processes emerge, the plan can and should be updated and refined.
To create a plan and build a high-performing sales team, you’ll want to start by assessing where your team stands, including how many associates and resources you have and what each person’s capacity, strengths, and weaknesses are. Take stock of your previous sales data (more on that below) and your audience’s needs, and use that information to help define your goal.
So, now you have your starting point — the team and your resources — and your endpoint — your revenue goal and the audience you expect that revenue to come from. Now you can fill in the middle, laying out smaller objectives along the way and assigning personnel, resources, and tasks (how you plan to achieve these objectives) to each one.
It can be helpful to work within a template here; small organizations with uncomplicated goals might find a free or nominal fee template online. Larger organizations with more complex needs might want help from experts to create a sales plan that efficiently captures your strengths and creates a pattern of repeatable wins, which will improve your bottom line.
2. Consistently Develop Your Sales Team
Another way to tap into your team’s strengths and address any weaknesses is through professional development.
Training shouldn’t stop after onboarding a new team member — it should be ongoing, consistent, and team-wide. Modern training methods that enable remote and virtual learning, such as eLearning, making it easy for you to continue investing in the development of your team.
As an example, one of our Prime 8 customers consulted with us to pivot to virtual training at the onset of the pandemic. By developing remote digital training solutions, the company was able to keep business going while also building better relationships with end users. Read the full story here.
Providing you select the right training programs for your team’s needs, your investment willpay off in the form of a high-performing sales team. While calculating the exact financial ROI can be tricky, requiring that you first analyze your current baseline for success (financial or otherwise) and define what level of increase would justify the investment, it’s worth looking at the long-term return.
According to one study, companies that invested in sales process training that ‘exceeded expectations’ were over 75% better at aligning customer needs and sales solutions, had higher success rates with 8% more sales reps achieving quota, and experienced nearly half the sales team turnover of those whose training fell short of expectations.
The kinds of skills your team can develop from effective training programs — a deeper understanding of best practices, better communication skills, and innovative thinking — are proven long-term revenue boosters. Add the cost savings that will result from lower turnover and the ROI is clear.
3. Track and Leverage Sales Data
Another excellent way to mechanize (and therefore replicate) sales intuition is through data and technology. Tracking your customers’ journeys through your sales funnel and noting where they either commit to the product or jump ship can help you focus your efforts on what’s working — and shed or revise what’s not.
In addition to helping you better predict which leads are more worth pursuing, data can also help you communicate with those leads more effectively. Whether it’s advertising and broad-audience messaging or individual interactions, having and analyzing data on your communications to illuminate which types lead to success and which are dead-ends can help you understand what to replicate or adjust.
High-performing sales teams that prioritize data analytics make initial sales faster, generate higher revenue from new accounts, and are enabled to price products higher. Incorporating data analysis into your sales plan can have a significant impact on your bottom line whether you develop BI solutions in-house or hire an expert to help democratize and visualize your product, sales and marketing data.
Build a High-Performing Sales Team with Prime 8
A great team is the core of sales success, and with these three strategies, you can take your already-successful team to an even higher level of performance.
Prime 8 Consulting has helped many companies implement strategies like these to create high-performing sales teams — we’d be happy to help your organization too! Learn more about our sales enablement consulting services.
