Nearly everyone in the business sphere wants to know how successful sales teams adapt and execute strategies to enhance performance. The answer to this is pretty straightforward—successful sales teams ensure effective sales performance and management by:
- Standardizing the right processes
- Hiring the right people
- Promoting the right culture
- Implementing the right technology
In order to drive collaboration, accountability, productivity, and performance, many organizations and sales teams today are using precisely worked out sales procedures that leverage today’s sophisticated technology.
How Businesses are Transforming Their Sales Procedures
Today, businesses are optimizing their sales procedures and other processes for automation, simplicity, and repeatability. Technology is only a ‘part’ of the puzzle. However, it’s an important part which, once employed, can generate the competitive advantage that you’ve been deprived of previously.
In addition to implementing new technologies in the organization that simplify the production line and the sales process, educating and motivating employees to set goals and satisfy customers’ needs to be prioritized. To ensure this, a performance management process that has the following components needs to be in place:
- Feedback
- Performance Review
- Goal setting and planning
- Skill development
In addition to the above, the process should allow managers to track information related to the following:
- Forecasting
- Sales quotas
- Incentive compensation
- Job evaluation
- Territories
While the above process can benefit your business in more than one way, you can only achieve these benefits by following the 3 key principles that ensure successful performance. The 3 key principles for ensuring successful sales performance are detailed below.
1. Prioritize Your Needs
All of your organization’s unique needs are what a strong sales performance management process addresses. However, this will only happen after you’ve considered what you really want to accomplish with your precisely worked out sales procedures, and have prioritized your needs. The following are generally the goals organizations set for their sales procedures:
- Easing the payroll processing
- Incentivizing the sales force
- Reducing overpayments
- Automating and streamlining manual processes
It is important that you prioritize the above-mentioned organizational needs. Once you’ve done that, focus on the must-have requirements first. Additionally, look to minimize risk in your sales procedures.
2. Use a Standardized but Flexible Sales Process
The importance of this cannot be emphasized enough. Having a standardized but flexible process for all business functions is critical. In production, a production flow system that is well-defined but flexible enough to adapt to your unique needs at the different stages of the product flow will allow you to get your products to the market faster and maximize your return rate.
Similarly, a standardized but flexible sales process will make it easier for your sales team to sell your products. Your sales reps won’t be able to manage if the sales process:
- Isn’t well thought out
- Haphazardly fabricated
- Inappropriately (less or more) focused on sales reps
In order to generate sales, both sales reps and managers must find their own ways around such a sales process. The sales processes ‘set in stone’ never yield the best results. Instead, the best sales processes are as zestful as the market they exist in. Such sales processes allow sales teams to quickly rectify the process in case an unnecessary step exists, or a step is missing or incomplete.
However, organizations should adopt such dynamic sales processes only if they have the right people and technologies in place. Additionally, they must define and implement the necessary metrics once a sales process is fully established. This will ensure an accurate measurement of the various phases of the sales process.
3. Ensure Accurate Analytics
The third and final principle that ensures successful sales performance is accurate analytics. Without accurate analytics, sales managers will make inaccurate assumptions. When sales reps act on these assumptions, sales will go down, hurting the company’s bottom line. One way of ensuring that sales managers have access to accurate analytics is by having a production flow system in place at your organization.
Clifford Woods is the President and Financial Manager of Marketing Results International
