Bringing in business depends not only on how good your inbound marketing program is, but how good your follow-up is to strong leads. Typically, your sales team pursues leads and closes the deal, and without a strong sales department you can’t be successful. 
Get the Right People
Square pegs just don’t fit in round holes. That super sales person just isn’t a manager, and just because your sales manager knows how to motivate others doesn’t mean he can close a deal himself and obtain new customers. More than anything, it’s important to recruit the right people for your sales department. Determine what the major criteria are for successful sales people in your industry or company and rank prospective candidates against the list. And when you find them, focus on helping individual team members to understand their goals and find out how motivate themselves. Look for outstanding salespeople characteristics such as:
- Willingness to learn
- Former sales success
- Natural curiosity
- A strong work ethic
These are all typical traits of successful business people, and when they are supported by sound product knowledge and an ability to present themselves well, you have a winning formula.
Give Good Leads
At one time, sales people would be given lists of potential contacts and they’d start cold-calling. This doesn’t work that well any longer, because most consumers don’t respond well to this approach. By implementing inbound marketing, however, you can develop a comprehensive lead generation program that enables you to nurture prospective clients through the sales cycle until they are ready to make a buying decision. A steady supply of warm sales leads, nurtured along to just the right point, will help motivate your sales department to follow them up without delay.
Find Quick Wins
“Nothing succeeds like success,” as the saying goes, so finding a few quick wins is a sure-fire way to motivate your sales staff to deliver on your vision. Work on identifying areas where your representatives can secure small successes that will pave the way for larger ones. This will help to motivate them and increase the amount of effort they put into their sales.
Celebrate Major Successes
In the same vein, it’s important to recognize achievement when you see it, and having solid sales targets for your team is the best way to know when someone has reached a goal. Reward your staff and give them public accolades, whether these are financial or not.
Get Buy-In
Getting your team’s buy-in to take control of their own development can make a huge difference to their performance, both as individuals and as a group. You can’t force them to be motivated; they have to do it themselves. You can encourage the process, however, by creating a personal action plan for each team member, which will help them to boost the attitudes and key behaviors the need to succeed in sales. It’s important to include team members in the development of their plans, because that enables them to make them both personal and specific.
Develop Accountability
Make each sales person accountable for his or her share of the sales. Use metrics such as:
- The number of leads each salesperson receives
- The number of leads they connected with
- Number of leads converted to presentation opportunities (if applicable)
- Number of presentations that were converted to demonstrations
- Number of sales closed as a result of the demos
Each month, look at your sales people’s numbers and measure them against the marketing metrics as well as against each other. This will help you to identify the issues they have to deal with, and you can then select areas where coaching can help them.
Implementation of these strategies will help turn your mediocre sales department into a hot-shot team of super sales people and put every other industry or company group to shame.
*Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
