Practical Ways to Revitalize Your Sales Team: Coordinate Your Resources

If the sales team in your organization is not delivering the results needed, it may be time to revitalize the team. One of the most practical ways to revitalize your sales team is to ensure that resources are coordinated effectively.

Examine the Sales Process?

The sales process guides the way resources are coordinated for effective use. Review the sales process to determine if improvements are needed.  Periodic adjustments can ensure effective use of resources and is one of the practical ways to revitalize your sales team and its overall effectiveness.

Thoroughly examine the sales process, with the following questions:

• What are the specific steps in your sales process?  Draw a process map and explain each step in the process.
• Does the sales process still fit your mission? Your customers’ mission?
• Do your sales managers support & coach the current process? How do you know?
• If the sales process was redesigned to be more adaptive to your mission, what would happen?
• What would it take to put a more adaptive sales process into effect in terms of resources, such as: people, training, tools, messaging?
• A 20% increase in sales, coupled with a 10% reduction in the size of the sales team; what effect would this have on the company toward achieving its goals?

Your candid answers to these questions will determine if changes in the current sales process are needed or if changes are possible that can improve the selling-buying process.

Operational Efficiency as Part of the Sales Mission

Coordinating your resources (talent, processes, technology) to your Sales Mission yields operational efficiency.  A clear Mission (actionable. measurable, w/timing) offers the opportunity to finely tune your resources, and to more effectively integrate across departments for maximum productivity.

Missions are scalable, and the sales team’s Mission should be a sub-set of the company’s Mission. The sales team should review and reset its talent, processes, and tools to maximize the attainment of the Sales Mission and Company Mission.

High Performance Results from Measured Execution or “Doing the Right Things”

Specific metrics signal to the team that you will measure their execution of the mission-aligned processes, and their demonstration of targeted behaviors. It is very important to have fair and relevant measures.  Performance metrics should measure the team’s behaviors and process execution…plus, show where improvements are working or are needed.

Answering the following questions will help determine if the correct metrics are being used.

• How does the sales team feel about the relevancy of the current metrics?
• What behaviors are needed from the sales team to attain the mission?
• What metrics will be appropriate for measuring these behaviors in the team?
• If you disregard sales quota attainment, how is it determined which team member contributes the most to the team’s success? Explain the answer.
• Do the measures identify potential leaders? Explain the answer.

Strong performance metrics is one of the most practical ways to revitalize your sales team because they clearly show where the high value contributions are being made, and where improvements are needed.

Image courtesy of Horia Varlan