A cohesive sales team prioritizes the company’s growth over its own. Individual and group objectives are being met, and everyone feels as if they have contributed to the team’s overall success.
Having a cohesive sales team means that your individual reps will prioritize the group and company goals over their own quotas. This means that the company is making more money and progress.
As a sales manager, you’ll want to build a team that not only meets revenue targets but also communicates well and works well together.
You must understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide a forum for discussion.
Having a plan for managing your team will make your and their lives easier. Let’s look at some pointers for building a successful sales team:
Recognize and utilize each team member’s unique strengths.
Every member of your sales team is an individual with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. Working with each team member’s strengths necessitates first understanding what they are.
Strengths and skills are frequently confused, but they are not the same thing.
Strengths are things we discovered through a character assessment without any special training. However, mastering skills takes a lot of time and practice, whereas strengths don’t require you to bridge this gap.
Identifying your team members’ strengths can be as difficult as identifying your own. However, there are two ways to go about it:
- A simple self-assessment in which you ask team members to write down anything they believe they are good at.
- An explanation of what they like to do and why they like it.
Consider it a personal SWOT analysis in which members list their strengths and weaknesses.
- Allow them to complete the VIA character assessment. The test evaluates participants on 24 different personality traits. This and other tools can assist team members in determining their strengths.
The first step is to have employees write down their strengths and weaknesses. The sales manager is responsible for the second part.
The sales manager should be aware of an employee’s key strengths and weaknesses. This goes beyond memorizing test results and necessitates the manager spending time observing and analyzing their team.
The best sales managers go above and beyond simply delegating and supervising the work they assign.
They determine who is the best candidate for a job and how to best utilize their strengths.
They make certain that the way they assign work improves overall performance by doing so at the individual level. It is critical to focus on employees’ strengths and incorporate this behavior into your organizational culture.
At all times, encourage open communication.
The workplace should be a place where employees are not afraid to express themselves.
Meetings, where everyone can freely share their opinions, are one way to encourage communication. In order for this to occur, these meetings should be informal and can even take place outside of professional office settings.
Such open communication has the potential to be extremely beneficial to the company.
An open culture encourages employees to express their opinions on team and company decisions. This can aid in making more informed decisions that benefit everyone in the workplace.
A different point of view, if correct, can save a lot of time, effort, and money. This is possible when team members rally around the core mission of the team or the company as a whole, regardless of their role in the team.
Sales managers can use the following tips during meetings to ensure open communication within their teams:
- Instruct participants to write down or speak about their thoughts on the company and its future direction. It could be changes in strategy, changes in sales proposals, or something completely different.
- Discuss what the team and organization require that you, as a manager, are aware of. If these ideas aren’t written down, it’s critical that you introduce them during the session.
- Divide the team into 5 or 6 groups and assign goals based on the meeting.
- Assign goals to participants based on their strengths.
The goal of these meetings is to provide participants with a unique forum to discuss their strengths and how they can apply them in various areas.
Team members should work together rather than compete with one another.
Encourage the habit of collaboration by making each team member understand that collaboration is what will bring everyone success.
Collaboration is a characteristic of the entire team, not just the individual. It must be ingrained throughout the organization as part of the company culture.
Fear motivates people to perform well in a competitive environment. It constantly encourages sales reps to go above and beyond the stated requirements and encourages employees to outperform their peers.
In a collaborative environment, some motivations include wanting to keep the job, not stressing over results but improving creativity, openly sharing ideas, and feeling inspired to go to work.
While both environments can produce results, being overworked or driven by fear leads to burnout. A sales representative, for example, is more likely to close a sale if they are motivated by factors other than the pressure of meeting targets.
Collaborative environments promote positivity, teamwork, and the ability to be creative. It’s more long-term.
It can be as simple as asking successful reps to share lessons learned from previous campaigns and pro tips to help everyone improve.
Look for people who are eager to learn and grow.
It is simple to identify coachable members of your team.
The first step in coaching your team is to ensure that they are open to receiving assistance, feedback, and advice. Furthermore, your sales representatives must be willing to accept that there is room for improvement, as this demonstrates their good intentions and willingness to learn and do better.
The following are some characteristics of a coachable team member:
- Adaptability to coaching
The willingness to improve is demonstrated by the person’s openness to coaching. The coach should mention the obstacles they must overcome before taking on new responsibilities.
A coachable person has no qualms about admitting that they are not good at something and are open to improving.
- Eagerness
Sales reps demonstrate their eagerness to learn new skills by responding enthusiastically when presented with the opportunity to do so.
- Examine how people interact with mentors or coaches. A person who wants to learn and improve will discuss areas where they are struggling and how they want to improve in those areas, and will sometimes seek out a coach on their own.
Coaching is not a passive activity.
The learner must do something to better themselves and accept advice as constructive criticism, never as personal criticism.
Team building does not always have to be a serious endeavor. It can also be enjoyable.
Look for novel ways to achieve team cohesion and close every deal you assign to your team.
Conclusion
It takes time and effort to build a cohesive and successful sales team. However, if you use strategies such as holding meetings to discuss members’ points of view, encouraging collaboration over competition, and learning how to leverage the strengths of others to grow collectively, you will have your dream team.