3 Things to Focus On For Optimal Team Performance

This is the second of two posts on the role sales management plays in optimizing their sales organization. (If you missed it, here’s part one.)

Process doesn’t make for perfect but it will get you pretty close. Having a structure in place will highlight your weaknesses and your wins which makes for a stronger sales organization.

There was a time when I mainly used my gut instincts to manage people.

Then I realized if I worked a little bit on developing some processes to hold reps and managers more accountable, I could be more efficient and get more out of the team. And that made things alot easier.

While there are is a ton to think about when setting up your sales organization, below are just a few things to remember that help with accountability and optimizing team performance:

The best organizations weed out weak performers

Great sales organizations constantly retool and look for ways to better themselves. Some even turnover the bottom 10% of their sales reps to push the rest of their team to keep getting better. You might think “Hey, some dollars from a bad rep is better than no dollars,” but this is short-minded thinking. There’s no need to keep a weak player on the team—cut them loose and focus on making the rest of your team better.

Every sales rep should be closing deals and maximizing your processes. If they aren’t, it’s a waste of time in the long run.

Check this out: reps lose on average about 1.5 days/week if you add up all the PTO, national holidays, internal meetings, travel time that hits their calendars. More reason for you to have a process for cutting weak performers.

A proven formula: Activity x Competency = Results

This is your formula for success—embrace it! Sales results per rep is easy to gauge with this simple equation. Before you think there is a product or marketplace issue, use the formula to validate how well your reps are performing.

First check activity:

It needs to be high because activity creates new opportunities and moves current ones forward. To keep a pulse on activity metrics, have weekly activity results emailed to your sales managers every Sunday so that on Monday morning they can see if people were getting after it the previous week.

Then, assess competency:

This also needs to be strong as this is what engages prospects and gets them to buy. To get a feel for how knowledgeable reps are, set up quarterly testing to score their selling abilities. Have them submit pitch recordings for evaluation (this is even easier to do if you have a Learning Management System tailored to your team, we used LearnCore), so you can compare reps, spot problematic trends, and share success stories with the rest of the team.

Leverage proper pipeline management and forecasting

The best way to avoid a poor sales month is with good pipeline management. Unfortunately, a common pitfall comes when sales managers focus all their energy on closing business and forget about driving activity. Sounds simple to avoid, but managers are known for getting pulled into the daily grind rather than focusing on where the team is moving (or not moving).

Establish a pipeline where opportunities can be bucketed into clearly defined stages (5-7 stages is a good rule of thumb) so everyone knows exactly where the pipeline sits. A benefit of this process is that over time you will be able to have high predictability on which opportunities you’ll win the business and which one’s you won’t.

Forecasting is all about late-stage opportunities and predicting what will close in the next two weeks, month, or 60-days for example. This should be a sales manager’s bread and butter since they’re more active in these opportunities with their reps. One effective way to ensure sales managers are thinking about sales predictability is by having them submit an initial forecast at the start of a month, and then allow them to re-forecast mid-month as opportunities move through their stages during the front half of the month.

Conclusion

Great sales management starts at the top and moves throughout the organization. If you want to be the best and achieve extreme growth then it takes holding your team (and managers) accountable to higher standards in order to get the best out of them. Forget process for the sake of process, but rather think of it as helping you be more efficient and focused so you can lead the team to where they need to go.