Sales reps are the front lines of your business, and keeping them motivated to sell is key to any company’s success. Sales managers and directors must drive sales team’s motivation, and they must be keenly aware of common management pitfalls that can actually hinder sales team performance. These are four of the common ways that managers keep their teams from selling – and advice on how to correct them, so that your salespeople will remain motivated throughout the year.
Pitfall One: Making The Customer Qualification Matrix The Responsibility Of Reps
Your Customer Qualification Matrix is a set of criteria for a successful customer relationship. That matrix should be dictated by the company, and it should be based on hard numbers and facts. When sales managers let reps decide what successful relationships look like, no two standards will be the same. Moreover, those standards will be based on feeling alone, not metrics. Standards are important to keep salespeople on track and to establish a clear means of measuring success, and they should come from the top down, not the bottom up.
Pitfall Two: Expecting Sales Reps To Be The Sole Educators of Prospects And Customer
Part of selling is educating a prospect on your products and services. However, putting that responsibility solely on sales is unfair and takes away from revenue-generating activities. The marketing department should be tasked with developing educational assets that get prospects through the early stages of the funnel. Blog posts, brochures, white papers, articles and case studies should be readily available when reps need to pull them.
Pitfall Three: Using Salespeople As Clerical Staff
CRM databases are designed to make sales reps’ job easier. But if they spend 30 minutes with a customer and then 60 minutes documenting everything and then filling out redundant call reports and log sheets, it takes away from selling time. Sales assistants should be made available to transcribe notes or transfer CRM notes into other documents. It can also be wise to invest in voice-to-text software so that CRM forms and notes can be auto-filled in real time.
Pitfall Four: Letting Sales Reps Direct Marketing Activities
On one hand it makes sense to ask sales reps to build their own presentations and materials tailored to their unique prospects and customers. However, salespeople should not be tasked with gathering research, managing marketing spreadsheets and compiling everything into a professional-looking presentation. First and foremost these activities take time away from the act of selling. Second, salespeople are not marketers.
Every presentations that comes out of the sales department should have the same look and feel. Marketing teams should be responsible for designing templates for sales reps to use, and if custom design or custom research is required, marketing should be the department to handle it. This not only keeps branding consistent, but ensures that reps focus on what matters: closing deals.
Strong sales managers know how to give their teams the tools to close deals. If you are on the hunt for great managers and sales reps to drive your business forward, contact the recruiting team at CSS ProSeach today. We are a leader in sales recruiting and our experts have the experience to connect you with top sales talent that will drive your business forward.