Three Must Haves For Your Sales Team
Having a good sales team is always going to be a driver of growth. If your sales people can’t or won’t do the work that you need, revenue will reflect it. It stands to reason then that hiring the right sales people is crucial to your business’ growth and success.
Here are three ways to make sure you’ve got the right people for your sales team:
They Communicate How Clients Communicate: Millennials are far more comfortable sending e-mails, texts, and any kind of message to get their point across. Baby Boomers extol the virtues of picking up a phone and speaking to a person. There is a time, place, and audience for all forms of communication. If you’re trying to get something from an entrepreneur who happens to be a younger generation than you, you’re not going to get far with your voicemails. Chances are they’re not even listened to. However, if you’re courting someone who is sick of having their inbox flooded, you will stand out by having the audacity to call and speak with your voice while others passively make weak, electronic attempts to get attention. Having a good sales team is about creating a balance and making sure you don’t have a team of people allergic to the phone or a company of folks who can’t persuade in the written word. Hire people who will communicate comfortably the way your clients prefer. Flexibility is key.
They Do What They Say They’ll Do: It’s pretty easy to consider yourself a salesperson if you can talk your way into or out of things. It’s a gift. The thing is, being a salesperson is about building relationships, so that moment of agreement is not the end of a transaction, but the beginning. If your salespeople don’t follow through, they’re bad. They’re bad for you, for the company, for your image, for your customer, for your goals…for sales. While they see the value in getting someone to “yes”, they shortchange mining the depths of the real opportunity in the untapped potential of the relationship you could build.
They Focus On Activities That Have Results: Once in a groove, everyone has their favorite and least favorite parts of a job. Maybe you enjoy engaging on LinkedIn but hate in-person networking events. Maybe you love calling leads after a tradeshow but hate cold calling. Regardless, your job includes activities that, regardless of whether you love or hate them, are still required. A good salesperson will set personal bias aside and evaluate and prioritize activities based on their results. The tasks with the biggest ROI will take up a majority of the day; the ones that have little to no impact or are only tangentially significant are relegated. It’s not about what the salesperson wants to do, the good salesperson knows it is about what will bring in revenue, keep customers happy, and help the company reach its goals.
While there are so many more factors to consider when hiring your salespeople, these three are must-haves to experience any success. The Alias Group’s inside sales team commits to analyzing a client’s business completely before applying a strategy so that our efforts are purposeful and meaningful. Our team is accountable to goals through measurable tasks and results. Cracking the code of how many and what kind of touches it takes to convert a lead or close a sale and executing that strategy is what we do at The Alias Group day in and day out. Do you have the right people that have the skills in place to help you move toward your goals?
