7 Effective Ways to Turn Your Sales Reps into Top Performers
Building a sales team made up of smart and dedicated salespeople is crucial for businesses. Yet, finding those people is not always easy. Not all sales reps are created equal.
Your team may have some great performers, some that are doing just enough to secure their position, some that are struggling to hit the numbers, or most likely a combination of the above.
The good news is, with some effort, you can turn your existing sales reps into top performers - without having to recruit new personnel.
How to Identify Weak Performers
How exactly you define bottom sales performers will vary from company to company, but every team has them. Even with 100 percent quota achievement, there’s still at least one team member who isn’t performing at the same level as his or her peers.
Managers need to conduct performance evaluations regularly to make sure their sales reps are on the right track, but it’s still not always easy to identify weaker links on the team, especially when overall team performance is high.
Automating the performance evaluation process using AI and machine learning makes it easy for managers to determine who may need additional training.
Prodoscore is a solution that quickly captures thousands of data points across your cloud tools to evaluate productivity and provide insight into what’s working and what may not be using one simple score.
How You Can Turn Weak Links into Performers
- Know them In and Out Of The Office
Take time to get to know your people. Knowing your team outside of the office (without interfering in their personal space) is as crucial as knowing them in the office.
To do it successfully, managers need to be good observers and know:
- Who their salespeople are
- What motivates them
- What they expect from their career
The little time you invest in knowing the answers to these questions will pay dividends because as you buy into your people, they buy into you.
- Give Them Earned Autonomy
If sales reps are not doing exceptional but performing at satisfactory levels, give them the autonomy to own their role. Make them feel that they need to take ownership and that their contribution matters to the company so they’re encouraged to develop a deeper sense of ownership and accountability.
- Encourage Collaboration, Not Competition
Healthy competition is good, but sometimes it can go too far. Competition can also lead managers to compare two individuals with different strengths, which can result in unfair judgments.
Taking a collaborative approach and bringing a team together to support each other is the right way to build a stronger, further-reaching sales force. Ask top performers to share their experience with other teammates.
- Rally Around Performance
Every activity of your sales team revolves around performance. Celebrate the wins with all your teammates irrespective of their performance. Make your sales reps feel like a part of the success even when they may not be direct contributors.
Likewise, share the disappointments so that the group can discuss their views with each other and come up with a solution.
Regardless of whether it's a group win or misfortune, it's a manager’s responsibility to lift up team morale.
- Find Coachable People
We discussed the importance of coaching even when time is tight in our previous blog.
It is critical to identify who needs coaching and where there are areas for improvement. You can take the role of a coach or ask teammates to take the lead and help their peers polish their skills. When reps find themselves improving with the help of the teammates, it builds a strong bond and mitigates tense competition.
Remember, growth comes from continuous learning and success isn’t possible without this mindset.
- Recognize Weak Spots and Complement Them
Sales reps who are struggling to hit their numbers may lack a skill that is holding them back. It is important for you to understand what that is and address their challenges.
It might be a technical skill or an issue of motivation. When it’s technical in nature, coaching becomes incredibly important. When it comes to motivation, things like incentives, flexibility, and employee benefits, for example, can really drive success for some people.
- Invest in Training
Salesforce’s “State of Sales” report outlines that “80% of high-performing sales teams rate their sales training process as outstanding or very good.”
While some sales reps are fine with just internal training from company coaches, bringing in an external coach can create a different impact on their learning ability. It is important that underperformers are motivated, which is where an external coach can help.
Professional trainers have their own way of balancing learning and fun. There’s good reason to extend training benefits to all salespeople – not just underperformers. Ongoing sales training will benefit sales performance as a whole.
Get Started
Now that you have some ideas for how to improve sales productivity, start by identifying the weak links on your team using Prodoscore. By streamlining your team’s performance evaluation, you’ll have the insights you need to make informed decisions and impact revenue before the end of the month.
