How to Build a Winning Sales Team

Business development, marketing, and a good product or service are all essential elements on the way to meaningful revenue growth. But your sales team is the heart of your business. 

Marketing professionals spend much time trying to communicate with the ideal audience. However, chances are the first time a customer talks to your brand is when they want to buy something from you. 

And 90% of the time, the person they will end up speaking to will be a sales representative. So, sales teams aren’t only about growing revenue. They can significantly impact business reputation, customer relations, retention of customers, and overall business growth.

But how do you build a powerful sales team?

In this article, we want to give you five steps to building such a salesforce from the ground up. 

Step 1: Start with a sales management strategy

Before you find perfect candidates to form your team, you need to set the vision and strategy for your future sales team. One essential part of this is building the sales process that your team will follow. This will help you understand what kind of talent you have to look for. 

• Determine what kind of salespeople will suit the strategy

The type of salespeople your organization needs depends on your business model, the nature of your products or services, your business growth, and your target market. Consider whether you need internal sales, local sales, or both.

Also, determine the required level of training and experience, and decide on the number of sales representatives you need to hire. 

You may even create a salesperson persona, making a list of characteristics such as:

• Personality traits 
• selling style
• background and experience
• training and education
• motivations
• etc.

Planning these things ahead of time will ensure that you hire the right people to do the right job. Then, once you have determined what type of salesforce you will need to bring in, you can start hiring them.

Step 2: Organize the hiring process

Hiring can be very time-consuming. Having a well-structured and documented process can help you cut down on wasted time and get better results. A structured process also becomes repeatable and scalable.

Most HR teams build their hiring process around the following stages:

• Planning. At this stage, recruiters usually get the job opening approved and post the job ad. They also decide on the recruiting budget for their position, prepare the description for the ad, and assemble their hiring team.

• Attracting talents. This stage involves hiring managers’ actions to find qualified candidates – for instance, candidate sourcing, job advertising, or asking for referrals.

• Selecting potential hires. Then comes the most critical part – a candidate screening on the interview. This can also include screening calls, various pre-employment tests, etc.

• Offering the job. A hiring team drafts and sends a job offer to the desired candidate if all goes well.

Step 3: Take care of the strong onboarding process

Employees need to feel comfortable so that they can work efficiently. While onboarding them, you can give that comfort to them by explaining how it all works in your company and showing that you’re here to help. Even if you all work remotely, consider assigning an onboarding partner to new hires. As a leader, you can be this onboarding partner too.

According to statistics, companies with a standard onboarding process experience fifty percent greater new hire productivity.

Step 4: Measure the productivity with the sales metrics 

For people to approach their work responsibly, you need performance metrics. Therefore, it is necessary to provide a set of easily measurable and understandable performance indicators that the entire team would adhere to.

Some important KPIs that you should measure are:

• sales growth
• the cost of attracting customers
• duration of work with a client and its value
• customer churn rate
• conversion rate
• profit margin per sales representative.

Step 5: Build a healthy corporate culture based on trust

Trust is crucial for healthy relations and company cultures because it can improve communication, teamwork, commitment, and productivity. Here are a few excellent tips to follow when building trust: 

• Constantly communicate with your team

If people feel they work in an environment that allows them to be heard and address their problems openly, they are more likely to be engaged and satisfied in their roles.

So talk to people and always be transparent about changes within the company. It implies trust and respect. 

For instance, if you’re going to implement new software that would impact the entire team or extend the staff, your people will appreciate it if you explain everything in detail rather than they find out everything post factum.

With most teams working remotely due to Covod-19, building trust has never been more crucial. Chats and emails are a common form of communication in many workplaces. However, managers seek new ways to inform, engage, and motivate their teams to improve trust and boost productivity.

Using email signatures for internal communication is essential for companies in these times. It helps make conversations more personal and human, educate employees, and inform them about the latest company news. For example, adding the photo to your email signature at the bottom of an email will also help make online communication more friendly and build trust with recipients. 

Look at these email signature examples. Like them? You can create such a signature for yourself and even for every employee in your company with the help of an email signature generator. No design or coding skills are required. 

• Give and get honest feedback

When you’re leading a business, it can be easy to overlook the daily operations. Asking for feedback from employees and giving them feedback is an excellent way to gain some “on the ground” perspective and build trust.

Let your team feel that you appreciate their honesty and use it to make improvements in the company.

• Keep developing and learning. All of you!

If you want your business to grow like crazy, make sure everyone in your team (including you) continues to learn. 

Conclusion

While many think leaders make companies run, it’s no secret that businesses go nowhere without a powerful sales team. They’re out in front selling the products and services that keep brands growing. 

Hiring the right talent to join your sales team can make or break a business. If you find the best ones, you grow faster and faster.

This article shared five steps to follow to build a winning sales team. Have anything to add?