As functional, profitable and friendly as your sales team might currently be, there’s always room for improvement. Sales processes can be reassessed, work culture can be improved, hiring can be stronger, and every salesperson on the team can do a little better than they did last year.
Ultimately, the New Year is an arbitrary temporal marker, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the perfect excuse to enact positive changes. If you’re a sales manager looking to do better in 2020 than you did in 2019, then making concrete sales team resolutions is the way to go.
Here are four New Year’s resolutions you can make to create a stronger sales team.
Increase Productivity With Sales Engagement Software
The easiest way to increase the productivity of your sales development reps is with a sales engagement platform. It allows SDRs to work the best leads, and to work more of them. With queue-based lead routing, it prioritizes the best leads, and with its sales cadence management, it ensures each lead is thoroughly and methodically worked.
It’s a godsend for sales teams, but you want to get it off the ground the right way. If you plan on deploying a sales engagement platform, then get all your stakeholders involved, define everyone’s responsibilities with the platform, and customize it to fit your sales needs.
Improve Your Hiring And Onboarding
Creating a stronger sales team in 2020 starts with attracting great talent. Set out clear criteria in the hiring process: what skills and traits are you looking for, and what makes a candidate a perfect fit for your team’s particular culture? You’re not just looking for the hottest salesperson – you’re also looking for one that will click with the team.
While you’re at it, strengthen your onboarding process as well. Familiarize new hires with the processes you use, and the specific tools you use, like the sales engagement software you’re going to deploy (more on that in a moment!) Check in with them regularly to ensure they’re settling in and nailing their sales calls.
Embolden Each Team Member To Become A Star
In your capacity as a sales manager, you have a profound impact not only on how your salespeople perform but how they feel about their performance. Instead of punishing failure and letting success go unrecognized, do the exact opposite. When a salesperson isn’t meeting their targets, work with them to improve, and when a salesperson succeeds, celebrate that success.
Work More Closely With The Marketing Team
Who knows when this industry-wide marketing/sales rivalry began, but 2020 is the year it’s going to end. The sales team might believe that marketing is handing them garbage leads. The marketing team might believe that the sales team isn’t working the leads properly. In truth, it’s the silo-ing of the two teams that’s to blame. When marketing and sales work closely together, they share key insights that help the other do the best possible job. Sales engagement platforms, as mentioned above, really help in this regard, bridging the gap between a prospect and a potential customer.
This year, as everyone makes their individual New Year’s Resolutions lists, break out the whiteboard and write down these four resolutions for your sales team. Make 2020 a banner year.
