Building a sales team that consistently hits its targets and drives revenue can feel like an elusive goal.
Imagine transforming your current group of salespeople into a high-performing powerhouse.
A high-performing sales team doesn’t happen by chance. They’re developed over time by people with great dedication.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to refine your existing squad, the journey to excellence is straightforward.
In this blog, we’ll explore seven simple steps, backed by expert advice, to create the dynamic and effective sales team you’ve always envisioned.
Get ready to turn those sales goals into achievements by building the sales team of your dreams.
The different sales team structure
Before you build a sales team from scratch or even think of it, you need to understand the sales structure you want.
This requires you to identify and define your problem areas.
The sales structure can be a problem if not defined. This improper structure could lead to at least 1/3 of your team underperforming.
So, here are the four main types of sales organised structures:
- Functional structure
- Market-based structure
- Product sales force structure
- Geographic structure
Each of these structures comes with its pros and cons. You must understand them before you put them to use.
Below we talk about each of them.
1. Functional structure
In a functional structure, every team member has a predefined purpose, specialities, and interests.
Although having a functional structure is useful, it comes with a few challenges. There is less chance for coordination and collaboration because team members are specialists.
However, your Sales department’s team members need to interact with each other.
This may get tricky, especially when handling clients and accounts from different geographic regions. Cultural understanding and linguistic barriers may be a hindrance for your sales team.
Also, functional structures create silos of communication, especially if people are working on the same client and project.
Many interactions on the same day with the customer can overwhelm both the customer and your team.
2. Market-based structure
In a market-based sales structure, you organize your sales team around specific industries.
By assigning your sales teams to distinct sectors, you enable them to specialize and develop deep expertise within those areas.
This approach allows you to better understand and meet the unique needs of your customers, enhancing your team’s effectiveness and efficiency.
This organisational structure provides you with a strategic path for more sales. It also promotes stronger bonds with your clients.
However, it does have its drawbacks.
One significant downside is the increase in operational costs. Additionally, this structure can make management and strategy implementation more challenging.
3. Geographic structure
As the name suggests, the geographic structure organizes your sales teams by location.
This is one of the most popular sales structures in the world.
It is cost-effective because each team focuses on a single location, minimizing travel and associated expenses.
Familiarity increases between your sales team and your clients.
With familiarity comes customer loyalty. Your clients will want to keep meeting the sales team for better relations.
But, there are a few things that could improve this organisational model. First, you would need help with deciding the layouts for your team.
Also, your sales reps wouldn’t be able to specialise. This will cause lateral and vertical movement in your team.
4. Product sales force structure
The product sales force structure focuses on the products that your clients make.
With this structure, you will find your sales team more specialised. They sell to certain companies based on their products.
This structure is usually excellent if your business focuses on one industry. But, it could get overwhelming, especially when you keep scaling and bringing many sectors and products.
With this structure, you may also face communication and collaboration issues.
Whichever structure you choose, you must understand how it affects your business. Consider the results you want from your sales team. Identify your business processes to select the right one.
Then, all you need to do is to plan for building the best sales team.
A step-by-step process for planning and building a high-performing sales team
Here is a step-by-step guide for building your own high-performance sales team:
Step 1: Create a strong sales culture
A report by Deloitte says that a robust sales culture promotes business success.
A robust sales culture will work wonders for the team you hire.
This culture should motivate and spark inspiration in your new hires. With this, you can build a healthy, competitive sales team driven to deliver results.
A robust sales culture also contributes to employee happiness and job satisfaction.
So you must put effort into creating a safe space where your sales team will feel challenged, valued, and supported.
Put a strong emphasis on hitting goals, as it is a way of measuring performance. This helps cultivate a high-energy and productive atmosphere for your sales team.
Step 2: Build yourself as the coach
As a business owner or a sales lead, you must ensure that you become a great sales coach for your team.
It takes a visionary to build a sales organisation. So who is better than the person handling the business or the sales division of the organisation?
So, ask yourself these questions:
- What is the vision for your sales department and organisation?
- What are your sales volume, revenue, ROI, market penetration, and profitability objectives?
Once you have the answers, share this with your new hires and sales team. Encourage them to contribute to taking ownership of your business.
As a sales coach, your focus should be on ‘what’, the vision and objectives. The ‘how’ is the tactics and implementation. Leave that to your sales team.
Become the great sales coach your team needs. Provide them with the resources necessary to realise the vision. This is what great sales team building is all about.
Step 3: Hire your sales reps/managers
Who you hire can make or break your sales team.
You’re bound to receive many applications when building a high-performance sales team.
Apart from evaluating their ‘sales performance’ and experience while narrowing down on the applications, ensure you focus on their personality traits.
As a business owner or sales lead, you must ask yourself, “Is this applicant coachable?”
This question is super important.
Why? Because many talents do things based on their past sales experience. So even if you have a specific sales process and organisation set for them, they rarely follow it.
Avoid these people, as they may not work for you but for themselves.
Instead of them, look for curious applicants who ask a lot of questions and are willing to learn.
Another best practice is to hire applicants with emotional intelligence (EQ)
EQ is the capability to observe, interpret, deal and respond to emotions. This, in turn, influences the emotional responses of others.
TalentSmart states that EQ accounts for 58% of employees’ productivity and performance.
Furthermore, the same report states that 90% of the top performers in companies have a high EQ.
So, the big question is, how do you sort applicants based on EQ?
The best way is to look at the core EQ competencies of an applicant:
- Self-management
- Self-awareness
- Relationship management
- Social awareness
Ensure that you gain a good understanding of potential applicants in these aspects.
Step 4: Handle rejection well
The sales team faces a higher amount of rejection compared to other businesses.
It takes an average of 8 cold calls to reach a potential customer. Even when you do, there is no guarantee that they’ll convert.
The game of sales is a hard one. Around 80% of sales need at least 5 follow-up calls to close one deal.
This whole process comes with much rejection, which is quite harsh on your team.
So to build a sales team, you must ensure your team gets prepared to handle rejection.
A high-performance sales team learns how to cope with rejections. Rejections do not affect their motivation.
Want to create a team that can do this? Consider holding training sessions, periodic employee checks, and review meetings.
Create a platform where they can talk through these problems and find solutions.
All you need is one of your team members to start doing this and others will follow suit.
Step 5: Measure productivity and profitability
You need to measure the performance of your sales team. It helps your stakeholders understand the profitability of your sales volume.
However, you might find it challenging to effectively assess the productivity of your sales force. This challenge arises because performance measurement should incorporate both quantitative and qualitative criteria.
Quantitative criteria are straightforward since they are numerical and include:
- Sales volumes in dollars or units
- Growth over years
- New accounts added
- Profitability
Now let’s look at the qualitative criteria that you need to measure:
- Attitude
- Selling skills
- Proactive initiative
- Communication
- Customer feedback
- Product knowledge
Using the qualitative approach, you must differentiate between aptitude and attitude. You can train to improve poor aptitude, but you should consider letting go of someone with a consistently bad attitude.
As a great sales coach, you need to communicate the objectives. Ensure that your team is evident on the parameters they need to achieve.
Also, be specific and set deadlines. This approach will help you build a great, high-performance sales team.
Step 6: Incentivise your sales team
An ambitious, high-performance sales team loves rewards and recognition.
Give your sales team the prerequisite so they can jump-start your business. This includes good pay and bonus plans.
You also must make an effort to recognise high-performing individuals. This also forms one of the key fundamentals to keep your team motivated.
Acknowledging your team’s hard work, especially in front of others, will motivate them. It also inspires others to perform better and outperform them.
Positive reinforcement is a time-tested method for motivation. So ensure that you have the right incentives for your team. This tactic will help you build a great sales team and, in the long run, will pay off tenfold.
Step 7: Deploy tools and tech your sales team needs for high-performance
Sales, like all the other functions, are changing.
To keep up with the changes, you must ensure that your sales team is up to date with tools and tech. This will make their work easy.
Tools and tech will make your team sell smarter and connect with customers globally.
Below are few tools that your sales team will need to use to get through the day:
- Grptalk (a must-have): This is an excellent voice conference tool, which doesn’t require an internet connection. You can use grptalk to connect with your customers.
- Trello: This is a free project management tool. It makes it easier for you to keep track of your employees’ progress.
- Highrise CRM: This is a paid tool that is lightweight CRM tool that helps keep your team efficient
- Dropbox: A fantastic tool that helps you with all your storage problems. Safe and secure for commercial usage.
- LinkedIn sales navigator: This tool helps you target the right prospects. It allows you to connect to them via standard connections)
The more tools your sales team uses, the more they discover ways to assist your customers. Tech is the difference between winning and losing.
Mistakes to avoid when planning and building a sales team
Here are a few mistakes you must avoid when building your sales team.
1. Hiring based on gut
Hiring great salespeople is one of the crucial steps in building a sales team.
However, several organisations completely ‘wing’ the entire hiring process.
So hiring based on a gut or without a plan could lead to failure.
Instead, look at it like this. Every sales context is unique. So, every organisation should have a different ideal hiring profile.
Your ideal hiring profile is built on a few parameters. They include your sales organisation, sales culture, ROI, and revenue. With this in mind, you can make a great sales team and an ideal hiring profile.
2. Sales and marketing misalignment
Sales and marketing are always grouped. Yet, these disciplines haven’t gotten together. Sales think marketing does nothing, and marketing thinks sales is an overpaid team.
This misalignment in your teams could set you up for a colossal failure. An aligned sales and marketing team is a prerequisite for a healthy organisation.
So, quantify your deliverables. Ensure that marketing and sales commit to one another and deliver them.
Measure their combined effort and share the same with your entire team daily. Now you have an empowered sales and marketing team.
3. Motivation through fear rather than empirical data
Most of the current workforce complains about a fear-based micromanagement style. This doesn’t sit well with them. Hence they keep moving to better pastures.
This management style should move back to where it belongs. It doesn’t work anymore, especially for the young workforce.
What you can do instead is automate a daily dashboard with all the KPIs of your team. This could include total connects, sales, discovery calls, and conversion rates.
Send this dashboard daily to your team, including the CEO and the marketing team.
This makes your sales team understand where they can improve. They can, in turn, perform self-diagnosis in the areas where they need more work.
Everyone in your organisation is on the same team. Providing daily metrics helps cultivate motivation and discipline.
4. Shadowing top sales performers
You make your new hiring tag along with your sales superstar for two months.
This is one of the worst steps you can take while building your sales team. This strategy needs to be more scalable and predictable. Every sale is unique. Every salesperson brings a unique superpower.
Having them shadow a superstar salesperson could dissuade them from discovering their superpower. Furthermore, it may encourage them to pick up bad habits from their peers.
You must create a definitive sales training process. This also benefits your team by teaching them common sales mistakes and how to avoid them.
This process will help you certify your salespeople. Also, it helps you quantify their aptitude at each stage.
Best practices when planning and building a sales team
Let’s learn from the sales gurus and experts about the best practices you must follow in building a sales team.
1. Know your employees (in and out)
Jim Durbin, the Recruitment Marketing Director at PSG Global Solutions, wants you to know your employees in and out.
“This is one of the most important things you need to do when building and managing your sales team,” says Jim.
Jim continues, “The line between work and home gets blurred now. The COVID pandemic is one of the significant contributors to this phenomenon.”
“Today, it is critical to operations that you know your team outside the office as much as you know them inside it,” Jim adds.
“Suppose your end goal is to drive cohesion within your team. Carve out the time to get to know your people. Know who they are, their motivations, and their career aspirations,” the expert says.
“This investment in your sales team will pay dividends for you and your business. This is because you buy into people, and the same gets reciprocated from them,” Jim concludes.
2. Collaborate, don’t compete
Will Yarbrough, the Vice President of Sales at Fleetio, has quite a unique take. He says, “Most sales teams compete against each other and amongst themselves.”
“I concur with bringing a team to support each other’s efforts. Also, sharing leads builds a more robust and healthy sales team,” Will adds.
“To do this and become a common practice in your sales team, have your team share their best and worst practices. We value experience, one of the most valuable lessons your team can understand. That is from each other’s wins and losses,” he says.
“This promotes a healthy sense of collaboration rather than cutthroat competition,” Will concludes.
3. Practice before the real thing
“Do you know the common thing between all high-performing sales teams?” asks Henning Schwinum.
Henning helps growth-minded Founders, Owners & CEOs build sales into an effective & repeatable process.
“It’s practice,” says Henning.
Henning says that a culture of practice is the most critical aspect of building a sales team. “Each employee of your team must practice and have enough prep before they start working on the floor.”
“Without practice, you’re leaving your team to wing it, which is simply a recipe for disaster. As a leader, you need to establish processes and culture. Ensure they promote the practice and roleplaying of customers,” says Henning.
“This helps your sales team function well but also helps your customers too,” Henning adds.
4. Coachable people make a great team
Howard Brown, the CEO of Revenue.io, says, “Coachability starts at the top with sales execs and managers.”
“Not only should our sales team and managers understand the importance of coaching. It should also translate into a passion for coaching the newbies on your team.”
“This only happens when you hire based on their coachability – rather than their general resume. I want the readers to know that growth only comes from continuous learning. It’s only possible when your team has coachable employees,” Howard adds.
Effective communication strengthen your sales team
You now know the steps in building a high-performance team and the mistakes to avoid:
However, your sales team can succeed only with effective communication among themselves and your customers.
A strong audio conference tool can build and manage your sales team. grptalk is the only tool you’ll need for your sales team to operate effectively and succeed. Grptalk lets you contact your customers even if they don’t have an internet connection.
So take your sales team towards success. Schedule a demo with our team today, or get started with free call minutes for grptalk.
