The success of field sales is measured by how individuals sell. Your role as team manager is to lead them, ensure they are on the right track, and guide them to fulfil their potential.
Your team must, first of all, be motivated by selling. It must also undertake all necessary training, and have a comprehensive understanding of the features and benefits of what it is trying to sell. Without these fundamentals in place, a sales team will not be successful.
Given the costs associated with hiring new employees, high employee turnover is a waste of both time and cost for the company. Therefore, the first port of call for a Sales Manager trying to improve their team should be improving the existing team.
Here are six strategies you should develop as you coach your teams and provide them with a process to increase sales and achieve their targets:
1. Clear communication
You should communicate clearly and openly when answering questions and guiding your Sales Reps. Your directions and information should leave no question unanswered and should be shared with everyone in the team.
The most effective way to improve communication within your team is to make it two-way. Make sure your Sales Reps are given the opportunity to share new ideas and feel that their concerns are heard.
2. Define sales goals
Setting goals for your team is a great strategy provided that you supply the coaching and training required.
When setting goals, they should be challenging but achievable. Achieving 70% of stretch goals is more efficient than achieving 100% of a mediocre goal. Set goals you believe each individual will achieve 70% of. Sales Reps who regularly miss their targets can be discouraged and become despondent.
3. Measure Activity and Results
You must be able to measure all necessary metrics to set and track goals accurately. Only by doing this can you increase efficiency within your team and identify areas for development.
Measuring sales activity metrics gives you much more than just topline results. It also provides clues as to how well each Sales Rep is implementing the sales processes you have developed. If several team members are failing to hit their targets, it might be that your strategy needs to be amended.
You must be able to measure Key KPIs such as lead-to-customer conversion rate, rate of follow-up contacts and closure at first contact, and have access to the necessary data at any time. This information is vital to help you pinpoint the reasons for missing out on deals or losing customers. Then you can take steps to improve results.
4. Make use of technology
Monitoring your sales field, easily reviewing KPIs, creating comprehensive reports with a few clicks and managing customer information are just some of the advantages of using FSM software.
Such software simplifies the daily tasks for you and your Field Representatives. It also provides internal transparency via a structure that is accessible to all authorised personnel.
Automating data sharing, communication, scheduling and distributing tasks can save huge amounts of time and boost overall performance.
5. Celebrate and Reward Wins
Celebrating victories is critical to increasing productivity.
Everyone likes to be recognised for a job well done, And it's arguably even more important for Sales Reps as they are competitive by nature and enjoy the adulation that comes with celebrating their successes. Beyond quotas, commissions or bonuses, being aware of individual and team performance can be a powerful trigger for competition.
Knowing their success is recognised and rewarded motivates teams to strive harder and achieve more. Analysing performance and recognising what went well, along with areas for improvement, can open the door for further improvement.
6. Choose the right tool
Successfully implementing the above strategies requires software that enables you to manage all field activities, track goals and provide your teams with the skills and knowledge to be successful. This will make it easier to identify valuable and practical techniques to improve your strategy continuously.
You can't expect performance to improve without giving your Sales Reps the tools they need. Benefiting from an intuitive, easy-to-use tool allows teams to focus on customer relationships and sales, saving time spent on manual tasks.
Lena Field is an FSM software developed to give you control over all organisational activities, not just teams. It allows you to prevent chain breaks associated with using different software for different departments and allows everyone to work in harmony.
While it simplifies customer and team management, it also allows you to manage customer satisfaction and service quality of field-based staff. With its comprehensive unit forms and report generator, Lena Field enables optimisation of communication with potential customers visiting your stores, as well as existing customers with whom your Sales Reps are in regular contact.
