Transform Your Sales Team in 2018

Looking to transform your sales team this year? As we kick off 2018, Gryphon Networks has compiled four crucial areas sales leaders need to focus on to boost their teams’ performance.

1. Sales Strategy & Execution

No matter the size of your organization, executing an effective sales strategy is a priority.  However, to do so, you must first have accurate and complete visibility into your team’s unique goals and business sales cycle. Common disconnects in sales strategy include chasing the wrong prospects and dollars, as well as misalignment of definitions between sales executives and the boardroom. All of which result in miscommunications and pull sales away from targeted revenue.

Leaders must work with their teams to develop skills that align with their sales strategy and enable reps to solve customer pain points. Sales reps should be able to demonstrate an understanding of customer problems beyond the sales script. By providing this insight, reps can develop more meaningful and trusted relationships with customers and will be seen as trusted advisors, not just salespeople looking for a profit. However, a disconnect occurs when there is a gap between how many times this is successfully executed compared to what the boardroom thinks.

Finally, it is important to establish benchmarks and analyze the right metrics to find patterns that are predictive of success. Use data to your advantage and understand which process work for your reps specifically to effectively transform your sales team.

2. Smarter Investment in Training

The number of reps hitting quota continues to fall year after year. Investing in training is essential, but it is time to invest smarter.  The primary barrier to achieving quota is poor communication. This stems from a lack of visibility into sales conversations, script adherence, and insights into prospect mood, to name a few.

Tools to improve training and coaching including call recording and speech analytics help managers understand why some reps are succeeding and others are not. They provide lead scoring, call results, and emotional alerts to enable sales leaders to better coach their reps, establish best practice standards, and improve their bottom line. Companies using these tools have seen double-digit growth in conversion rates within two months.

3. Tech Can’t Replace a Sales Call (Yet), But it Can Make One Better

Nowadays, advanced technology can enhance your team’s operations and improve performance—though it will not substitute the personal skills of individual reps. For example, a local Boston Bank implemented a sales intelligence tool with call tracking and recording to enhance foot traffic to their branch. The technology reminds agents when to make follow up calls, and analyzes a salesperson’s side of the conversation to look for red flags, behavior patterns, things to improve on, and best practice behaviors that drive positive results.

4. Use Data & Optimize Calling for Sales Results

Managers who actively review metrics and performance activities are more likely to lead their teams to success. As a manager, it is important to look at data to see the efforts output by agents, such as dials to appointments set, and the corresponding results.  Rep efficiency is key, and the successful rep will be the rep that prepares, instead of one who only focuses on the raw volume of calls.

Finally, in order to improve communication between reps and customers, it is important to analyze accurate, transparent data and CRM reports. Often manually entered and based on subjective data and speculative hunches, CRM data is usually not entirely accurate. By using accurate data provided by sales enablement tools, managers can pinpoint specific behaviors that get measurable results and replicate them across their entire organization. From macro trends to patterns of individual reps, look at statistics from calls to contacts and appointments, even which days of the weeks or times of day work best for reps. Doing so will improve conversion rates, better enable your reps to surpass quota this year and allow you to effectively transform your sales team.

To learn more about how to transform your sales team in 2018, Contact Us.