The Sales Team – Your Ultimate Guide
One of the most important functions in business, is to build an effective sales team that you can rely on to sell your products and services.
A high performing sales team can make the difference between a mediocre business – and one that brings your goals and dreams to reality.
In this article, we’ll explore how to build a sales team, how to hire, and the various other ingredients you’ll need to ensure they perform at a high and effective level.
The Sales Team – Your Ultimate Guide
What Kind Of Sales Team Do You Need?
The first thing you’ll need to research prior to building your sales team; is what kind of team do you need to build?
Generally, there are two types of teams.
One is inbound or inside sales, and the other is outbound or outside sales.
Inside sales is generally associated with Sales Professionals who work from an office location, and speak with their potential clients by phone, email, a CRM platform, or something similar.
Their leads generally are inbound.
Outside Sales Professionals meet their clients where they are at, and usually have to be a lot more proactive in getting leads or potential clients to talk to.
Sales Professionals involved in outside sales can be found at events, conferences, trade shows and product or service demonstrations.
Depending on your product or service type, the first thing you’ll need to do prior to building your sales team is learning whether inside or outside sales will be more effective for your business.
Related article: Outside Sales vs Inside Sales – What’s The Difference?
Hiring For Your Sales Team
Once you understand the type of sales team you need for your business, the next step is working out the team structure – and how many people you’ll need to be on the team.
Depending on the role type – your interview questions will vary.
A list of questions we highly recommend include:
- “Tell me about a time when something went wrong, and you took control. What happened, and what was the outcome?”
- “Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a colleague; what happened, and how was it resolved?”
- “Have you ever turned away a potential client? If so, why?”
- “Tell me about your sales process – what do the steps look like and why?”
- “From time to time, working in sales can be grinding. What do you do on a daily basis to stay motivated?”
We’ve written an article with many more questions we recommend using when hiring people for your sales team – including the rationale behind the questions.
Click the link below to learn what they are in more detail.
Further reading: The Best Interview Questions For Sales Hiring Success
Consistency
Once you’ve built your sales team; the most important thing you could do now to ensure their success, is to implement a consistent sales process for them to follow.
The benefits of using a sales process include:
- It creates a system; allowing you to close sales like a road map
- Certainty – for both you and your potential clients
- It allows you to control the process and conversation
Consistency is key for sales success, because your sales team needs a map to follow that guides them on a journey towards the sale.
The reason why so many Sales Professionals and Business Owners fail at making sales, is because they either lack a sales process, or they don’t follow it with consistency.
As per our article in Entrepreneur – we don’t recommend using exact verbatim sales scripts.
Instead, we recommend following a structure and step by step system, so that your results can be repeatable and consistent.
Learn our recommended sales process steps below.
Further reading: The 7 Step Sales Process – Learn To Close Easier
Training For Your Sales Team
As mentioned; the key to building an affective sales team and ensuring they perform to the highest level, is by giving them a sales process to follow.
The sales process will give them consistency, repeatable positive results, and will create an environment of discipline.
So how do you teach your sales team this system?
Our answer – with online sales training.
A lot of Business Owners and Sales Professionals forego sales training, because either:
- It’s too expensive
- They can’t find quality training in or around their area
For this reason – we created a self-paced, highly affordable online sales training program to solve this widespread issue.
Our online sales training course, The 5% Sales Blueprint – serves Business Owners and Sales Professionals in multiple countries and industries – as long as they want to sell more products or services in a consultative way.
We believe Sales Professionals and Business Owners should position themselves as Trusted Advisors – this way, they build clients for life, rather than build purely transactional relationships.
To learn more about our online sales training program as well as how it can help you close more sales consistently, click the linked page directly below.
Your Online Sales Training Course – The 5% Sales Blueprint
Measure
There’s a famous saying in business – ‘What gets measured – gets managed’; and we completely agree.
For your sales team to perform, they’ll need clarity on what they need to achieve, by when, and then learn how to do so.
The way to do this, is by implementing sales metrics into your business, and then making this crystal clear with each member of the sales team.
Some metrics we recommend include:
- The lifetime value of a customer
- Sales revenue
- Your retention rates
- The cost of acquiring a customer
- Your operational costs and overheads – are they all justified?
- How long does it take to close a deal?
- Your on boarding processes
- Your average conversion rate per conversation
- Cost per lead
Leadership & Your Management Style
Finally, a sales team can only perform as well as their leader.
The person at the helm of the ship needs to be approachable, confident, provide clarity and transparency, and have great communication skills.
An effective leader has a vision, and shares this with the sales team.
They operate with integrity and inspire their sales team to go above and beyond.
Related article: Qualities of A Leader – 10 x Needs For High Performance
Final Thoughts
In order to build, maintain, and keep a high-performance sales team, you’ll need to implement each and every one of the key ingredients mentioned in this article.
Consistency is key for success – not just as a leader, but in regard to your team’s sales process and your hiring.
As mentioned, we highly recommend quality training to get your team all on the same level.
To learn more about how sales training can help you and your sales team, read the linked page directly below.
Online Sales Training For Your Sales Team – The 5% Sales Blueprint