How to Manage a Sales Team and Maximize Revenue Potential

Every department plays a vital role in an organization. The sales team, for instance, acts as the business’s money-generating machine. Among their many responsibilities, they guide prospects through the sales cycle to conversion.

As useful as a sales team is to the standard business organizational structure, they’re not flawless automatons. They can flounder and fumble in their role, especially if they aren’t managed to the best of their abilities.

When they’re underperforming, your bottom line is dramatically affected. Sales numbers can dip, and your business can end up missing periodic sales targets and be put in financial jeopardy.

However, when you’ve motivated and trained your sales team effectively, your business can scale like never before—the dream of many early-stage SaaS enterprises.

Managing the sales team requires more than a knack for leading. It involves balancing various tasks, from interpersonal interactions to quantitative analysis.

To manage a sales team effectively, you’ll need to study, adopt, and train with the right attitude. In this article, we’ll dive into:

Goal-setting skills as a sales manager
Ways to effectively communicate with the sales team
The best sales management tools
Training and development tips
Ways to motivate and monitor your sales team

Let’s get the ball rolling.

Setting Clear Goals and Expectations

As a sales manager, it’s your responsibility to provide your sales team with tasks that help your company achieve a financial goal. This goal is called a sales target, and its difficulty can influence your team’s overall productivity levels.

It’s also equally crucial for you to give them an idea of what to expect in their role. Each team member should know their assigned duties and how they can contribute to business success.

Not only does this help clarify job function, but it also primes your team to focus and align in one direction—ideally, one that matches your company’s vision.

Establishing Sales Targets

A sales target is the underpinning measure of success for your sales force. For the specified timeframe, hitting the sales target is and should remain the primary objective of the sales team.

Here are five attributes of a good sales target to help you lead your sales team to success:

They are SMART: SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. A sales target that fits this profile can boost your sales team’s productivity and maximize their efforts.
They don’t contribute to job dissatisfaction: A borderline unrealistic sales target can foster frustration and burnout within the team, negatively impacting their morale and performance.
They’re not entirely numbers-based: Consider employing a mix of qualitative and quantitative metrics to measure goal success. Purely quantitative quotas can reduce intrinsic motivation and foster a poor culture, which can lead to burnout.
They align with business objectives: A good sales target recognizes the business’s mission and aligns with it.
They are categorized by time: Sales targets should be broken down into different timeframes (short, medium, and long-term) to make them more manageable.

Above all, you have to be comprehensive with your assigned responsibilities and deadlines to remove any confusion among team members. By setting effective sales targets, you can secure the trust of your team and lead them to achieving their goals.

Defining Roles and Responsibilities

While everyone’s purpose in the sales team is to sell, some business structures may require each sales representative to have a more unique purpose.

In such cases, be sure to be vigilant in defining sales team roles to ensure that they remain accountable and well-positioned for their role from the outset.

To remove any role uncertainty, you can focus on standardizing your sales training procedure and assigning a single person per set of tasks.

For example, you can designate one member to be a lead generation specialist whose main work is to find and qualify leads. You can then designate another member to nurture relationships with existing clients.

The good news is that sales, as a system, is replicable. While each sales journey is different, each transaction goes through the same sales cycle. This makes it easy for you to train a new hire (or cross-train current staff) to deliver results wherever they’re assigned.

Effective Communication

Sales teams rely on interpersonal communication and relationship building. Your beaming smile and time of day shouldn’t only be reserved for your clients. You should also regularly communicate with the rest of your team.

To foster effective communication practices within the team, consider following these practices:

Regular Team Meetings

It’s important to host regular sales team meetings to keep everyone in sync. It also provides an opportunity for your team to share updates or get feedback on their performance.

Sales managers can round up the team for several reasons. A sales meeting agenda template can typically be any of the following:

Welcome of a new member: A short introduction from the new hire and a round of hellos from the team.
Strategy and planning: Discuss strategies and sales operations to improve sales or make plans for upcoming campaigns.
Review of past period performance: This meeting highlights each team member’s performance over a period, usually the past week. The manager addresses any weaknesses and commends good performance.
Training and development: If new processes or updates regarding the product have to be relayed to the team, this can call for a meeting.
Goal-setting: This is all about setting targets and objectives for the next period.
General updates: Individual updates on progress and challenges faced by the team.

Open Communication Channels

As the manager, you should always be available to address concerns within your team. The way you interact with your team shapes the team’s culture.

For reference, the best type of atmosphere to foster is one where everyone feels heard and valued while remaining productive.

So for sales managers, consider incorporating the following tasks into your workflow for the benefit of your team:

Create a safe space for feedback
Do one-on-one check-ins
Create an anonymous suggestion box
Celebrate and praise top-performing members

Choosing the Right Management Tool

The simple act of inspiring your team isn’t going to boost your sales revenue. You also need the right tools to realize your company’s highest sales potential.

The right management tools can reduce your team’s administrative workload, allowing them to focus on more productive tasks instead.

If you’re handling too many clients to keep up with, a customer relationship management tool, specifically a B2B CRM, can help you effectively manage your client database.

This tool offers the following features:

Sales pipeline management: Provides visualization for the entire sales cycle.
Content management: Allows you to store and organize all customer data neatly.
Outreach automation: Helps keep your marketing operations on autopilot.
Customer analytics: Provides valuable client insights and KPIs to improve your sales strategy.

Unlike B2C CRMs, B2B CRMs tend to have lengthy negotiation periods and longer sales cycles. This requires a more hands-on approach, making tools like Instantly.ai essential to keeping up with the increased workflow and trends in the market.

Training and Development

If your pipeline is healthy but conversions are low, the bottleneck could be your sales team’s performance.

Therefore, you should look into providing frequent and quality training material for your team to sharpen their abilities. You should also be active in hiring new talent that can augment your sales force.

Here are the best practices when it comes to acquiring and training your sales team:

Onboarding New Team Members

Create a comprehensive on-boarding process: To make things easier for you and your new hire, develop a detailed pre-boarding and on-boarding process. Touch upon company culture, sales procedures, and company tools.
Provide feedback during initial training: Provide your new hire with relevant skills and knowledge about your company’s specific processes early on.
Set the right expectations: Let them know their role and responsibilities from the start. Communicate openly and answer any of their questions.

Ongoing Training Programs

Even if your employees have been with you for a while, you should polish their sales skills on occasion.

Continuous training helps boost employee productivity and delivery, which is instrumental for company growth.

These are some sales skills that every sales rep should possess and continue to refine:

Product knowledge
Building authentic relationships
Leveraging CRM tools
Sales techniques

Motivation and Incentives

The field of sales is rife with burnout and hardship. Sales managers should be proactive in engaging and encouraging their teams in their respective roles.

Encouraging Healthy Competition

Create incentive programs: Provide bonuses and commissions for salespeople who meet sales targets. Optimize and adjust the bonus amount depending on the contributions.
Tailor incentives: If you have a salesperson who constantly outperforms other reps, consider making a tiered incentive program to motivate them to hit higher milestones.

Recognizing and Rewarding Achievements

Public recognition: Praise and express gratitude to top performers in public to boost morale.
Provide perks: Additional work leaves, wellness breaks, and upskill opportunities may motivate the sales team to reach their quotas.

By motivating your team when they do well in their jobs, you’ll foster a positive culture and subsequently improve both individual and team performance.

Monitoring Your Sales Team

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics used to assess your team’s performance. It’s something every department’s management covers. For your sales team, it often measures variables within the sales cycle.

KPIs are often compared to business benchmarks to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your sales force.

Essential KPIs to Track

Conversion rates: Refers to the leads that become customers.
Annual contract value: The average sales of a signed contract over time.
Sales growth: Sales revenue over time.
Average deal size: Monitors each sale’s value to determine profitability.
Sales cycle length: Measure sales velocity from start to finish.

Key Takeaways

Sales can help you drive revenue, gain market share, and build a loyal customer base. A sales team leader provides the sales team with the direction and motivation to accomplish these tasks. Needless to say, this role is critical for any B2B SaaS business.

We hope that the tips and strategies we covered help you succeed in your sales leadership role more effectively.

To recap:

Setting clear goals helps direct your team towards measurable targets.
Communication fosters a collaborative, informed, and motivated environment.
Implementing on-boarding processes and training current staff helps bring out the best in your team.
Incentive programs can drive higher performance.
KPIs help you quantify team performance.
Customer relationship management tools help automate tasks, improve relationships, and enhance staff productivity.

Need a CRM to help your sales team reach their maximum potential? Sign up for Instantly.ai today