How to Improve Sales Performance

If you want your business to grow, one of the first things you need to do is look into and improve your sales performance.

But what exactly is sales performance, and how do you improve it? 

Sales performance measures how effectively a sales team performs within a certain time period. More specifically, it's the measurement of the sales activity results compared to the expected quota.

You’ll know you hit the sweet spot of sales performance when your team’s consistent sales results and quotas are met or exceeded for extended periods. So, the key word here is consistency. 

What Can Affect Sales Performance?

A few factors related to your sales enablement activity determine if and which training and guidance your sales reps receive, factors that directly affect their performance. 

These factors include whether or not your sales functions are aligned with the marketing team, which content is available to sales reps, and what is the customer experience. 

All these factors combined are needed so that sales reps can achieve their goals and optimize sales efforts. 

In other words, for your sales team to be successful, the company must ensure they have everything they need: training, ongoing coaching, and relevant content, as well as alignment of the marketing and sales functions. 

If you’re looking to improve your sales team’s performance, bear in mind that although individual sellers need to succeed, your entire sales team must collaborate to ensure they are successful as a unit. 

How To Improve Sales Performance

1. Implement a clear sales process

As we mentioned, consistency is key to improving sales performance. As part of your efforts to achieve consistency, it’s important to outline and standardize the sales process.

A sales process should consist of the following steps:

• Prospecting - By using your buyer persona data, you can find your ideal prospects and determine they are a good fit for your solution. 
• Research - Thoroughly understand your prospects' needs and customize your messaging to determine precisely how your product or service can be the right solution.
• Presentation (live sales demo) -  Interact with your prospects, utilize tried and true sales playbooks, and use sales enablement software to ensure your sales reps always have relevant sales content. 
• Handling objections - Sales reps must be prepared to answer all questions and concerns the prospects may have. Sales demo software can help, as it makes it easy to quickly find any content or information reps may need in real-time. 
• Closing. When the sale is made, which paperwork and details reps need to take care of to close the deal should be clear. 
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2. Sales enablement tech is a must

In this day and age, data shows that it’s almost impossible to engage prospects successfully if you don’t use the right sales enablement strategy and tools.

In CSO Insights’ 5th annual sales enablement study, the company found that “more organizations followed a formal and charter-based approach and saw significantly better results than those with a random or informal approach that achieved results way below average performance.” 

The report also found that the win rates of the organizations that achieved better results were 8.7 percent higher than the report’s average. 

3. Train better

This point can’t be stressed enough: in sales, you don’t need to hire top talent. Top talent should result from your training efforts. 

With that in mind, it’s super important that you implement a comprehensive, top-quality training program that teaches your sellers how to implement your strategy, follow your sales enablement best practices, and empowers them. 

It’s also worth noting that by providing instant access to knowledge, links, and examples whenever sellers need it, the right sales enablement software can help optimize your training efforts and eliminate that forgetting curve. 

4. Give them a goal to strive to

Setting goals and a clear progression path can help your sellers focus on what they are trying to achieve and motivate them.

We always say that in sales, training never really stops. The best way to keep your sellers motivated is to make sure they constantly learn - from other sellers, managers who lead by example, and from continuous coaching. 

When your sellers have plenty of opportunities to improve and achievable goals to strive for, they constantly become better at their job. 

5. Optimize your content

Sales content can propel your sales forward, but that can only happen if the content is properly organized and managed and easily available to your sellers whenever they need it. 

Sounds challenging? Well, as we briefly mentioned at the beginning of this article, a good sales enablement platform can do all the hard work for you. 

Once you have all your content neatly organized and readily accessible to your sellers on your enablement platform, finding it will take no time, and sellers will be able to improve their performance significantly. 

6. Customize your messaging and content

We don’t need to tell you that personalization is key to buyer engagement, but how can you easily customize email, presentations, and everything in between?

The trick is to prepare your base content and then adapt it to different industries and buyer personas. You can also use templates for presentations, emails, social content, etc to make personalization faster and easier for sellers. 

7. Base your decisions on performance metrics

All your decisions must be backed by sales data, which will show you where there are growth opportunities and where your weaknesses are.

Look into sales performance metrics such as:

• Quota attainment
• Win rates
• The length of your sales cycle
• Conversion rates

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