Your brilliant sales team likely has a few processes in place. Habits can be great or need adjustments. As you add new people and your company grows, the new and old styles may not mesh. If you want to get the most from every interaction with leads and create a highly efficient staff, you must tweak your processes until you find just the right mix.
How to Improve Your Sales Process
The Small Business Administration estimates there are 33.2 million small businesses in the United States. While your competition may seem like a much smaller, local pool, you are still competing for time and attention in a noisy, busy environment.
If you are lucky enough to capture the attention of your target audience, making sure you keep their interest is vital to closing the sale and improving your numbers.
What process improvements have the most impact on your growing sales department?
1. Improve Onboarding
How do you welcome new employees into your company? If a sales person understands your policies and procedures, they’re much more likely to adopt your company culture. Talk to your current employees about what knowledge they find most helpful to do their jobs effectively.
Create a process where you not only train new hires but match them with an experienced employee/mentor. If a new sales department staff member has someone they can turn to when they are uncertain, they’ll soon gain independence but be an asset to the entire team.
2. Incentivize Leadership
How much motivation do your leaders need to ensure every person on their team has the skills needed to blow the competition out of the water? Many believe sales managers are the most underpaid and underappreciated people on a sales team.
Imagine leading your team, putting in overtime hours, coming up with unique ideas and putting out fires only to have your top salesperson make double your salary. The high turnover in some positions is often due to people seeing that new folks hiring in are making as much or more than they are after many years of experience in the field.
3. Map and Measure
Map out your current sales processes. What happens in step one? Make a list of each touchpoint with the consumers all the way through follow-up.
Once you’ve mapped out your processes, figure out the best way to measure improvements. For example, if you want to see how effective your outreach to new leads is, figure how many convert into customers. Strive to improve the percentages.
4. Brainstorm Closing Methods
A key indicator of how well your sales team performs is based on how many sales you close. People today are fickle. It’s easy to browse online and then hop to a different site to buy the item.
Research shows about 40% of people change their minds just before buying. Reasons vary for this sudden shift away from buying. It’s your job to look at the closing process and overcome their objections. Perhaps they don’t like the shipping fees. Maybe they feel uncertain about whether they can trust you. Make part of your process reaching out to those who didn’t buy and finding out the reasons why, even if they never plan to make a purchase from you.
5. Appreciate Everyone’s Input
The best way to improve processes and strive for improvement is by making everyone on your sales team feel valued. Ideas should be celebrated even if they don’t work out. You want your team brainstorming, throwing out fresh approaches and looking for ways to grow just a little better each day.
Letting people other than management have a say also gives them ownership of the entire sales department. They’ll feel like company successes are their successes and continue to approach their jobs with a growth mindset.
Get an Outside Audit
If you implement the ideas above and still feel your sales team needs improvement, you can hire an outside consultant to come in and check out your processes. Sometimes getting a third-party perspective helps you discover things you wouldn’t notice.
Anything you can do to be more productive and positive goes a long way toward spurring business growth. Be open to utilizing different methods and trying new ideas.
