Adding new sales reps to your small business is a quite an accomplishment. It means you’re at a point where you’re ready to start growing your business and you’ve found and hired talented salespeople to join your team. But your job is far from over.
Even though many sales reps like to work on their own, they are still going to need training, coaching, motivation and incentives to maintain a high level of success. And as a small business owner, most likely you will be in charge of managing your sales team and everything else in the business.
Keep reading to discover 5 tips that will help you manage your sales team and still have time to work on other aspects of your business.
Train Them
Many small business owners have the misleading expectation that once they hire sales reps, the reps will be able to just show up and hit the ground running. No matter how experienced or talented the sales rep is, they’re still going to require some sort of training on your sales processes and expectations. New sales reps should be trained on your product, your industry, and general sales skills. If you’re going to be performing this training yourself, it’s important to create a well-rounded training program that can be replicated for each new rep. Having a consistent training program will help streamline the time it takes to teach new reps and ensure each new rep learns the same things. If you don’t have time to train new reps, then you should invest in an outside resource to help or else you run a high risk of turnover.
Have a Defined Sales Process
When managing and training sales reps, it’s crucial to have a defined sales process. Many small businesses don’t have a defined sales process because they have never had to teach anyone else the process. But as you start to grow your sales team, it’s important to have this process clearly outlined. You should start by defining the different stages of the process and who needs to be performing certain tasks at each stage. keeping your reps accountable also comes with having a unified process. Finally, knowing the ins and outs of your sales process will help you determine what types of salespeople will perform better in this role.
Motivate Your Team
When most people think about company perks and incentives, they think of huge bonuses, free trips, and ping pong tables in the office, and for small business, it can be difficult to provide such lavish perks. However, there are other ways you can motivate your sales team to reach their quotas or quarterly goals without spending a ton of money. Extra time off, gift cards, gym memberships, and internal recognition are all ways to help motivate your sales reps throughout the year and help them achieve their annual goals.
Sales Leadership
The number one reason sales reps fail is because of poor or lack of sales leadership. This is a very important statement to keep in mind as you hire new reps to your team. As a small business owner, you will spend a lot of your time trying to manage your sales team while also working on other aspects of the business. And as your team begins to grow, it can be even harder to keep up with long term sales strategy and new best practices. One way to ensure you get that your team gets the sales leadership they need is to hire a sales executive on a part-time or contract basis. For example, you can hire a VP of Sales for twice a month to coach your reps and work on strategy. By hiring sales leaders on a contract basis, you don’t have to pay their high salary costs, but still, get the benefit of working with such experienced professionals.
Culture
Finally, part of managing a successful sales team is to make sure your company culture is embedded in your organization and your employees. If you don’t know what type of work culture your company has, then take this time to intentionally define it. Then, communicate it to your employees in company messages, meetings, emails and even informal conversations. The more your sales reps know about and understand the cultural values you desire, the more likely those values will be upheld and demonstrated in their behavior. For example, if you want a fun, but hard-working culture, make sure you set up activities and games for your employees to interact while still making it known what is expected of them. Then as you begin to add new employees, you can look for people who are a match with your desired culture. The most important thing you can do as a leader is to set the tone and make sure you’re upholding the company’s values since your team will look to you as an example of how to behave.
As you begin to grow your sales team, it’s very important to make sure your reps are getting the right training, coaching, and leadership that they need. Use these tips to help balance your sales management duties with other business tasks.
If you’re not able to coach your sales team, then you should hire a sales leader on a permanent or part-time basis. There’s no need to keep replacing sales reps who are underperforming and adding new reps to your team if you don’t fix the underlying problem first: lack of sales leadership.
