3) Do you provide your sales reps with useful reports?
Your team should have access to activity reports – and, of course, they also need to know how to use them. Otherwise your sales reps will not know whether they are going to hit their activity quotas.
A further reason why they need access to reports is to track the outcomes of their activities. That will help them to spot areas for improvement too.
Another crucial report is the one on stage duration: this will show how long their deals are taking at a particular stage of the sales pipeline. With this insight, they will clearly understand in what area they need to develop and improve their performance.
4) What is the nature of your team?
Soccer is sometimes described as a “weak link” sport, basketball as a “strong link” sport. This means that a soccer team is only as good as its weakest link, so that when the entire team is stronger than average, the team performs better. A basketball team, on the other hand, needs to have a few star players who will motivate and lead the rest of the team.
In this respect, sales can be compared to soccer; in other words, the success of your team is determined by its weaker links. For you as a manager this means that you shouldn’t focus on helping the few extraordinarily successful reps in your team to close deals.
Instead, you should use your time to help those lagging behind to raise their game. You can segment your sales reps based on the ratio of their closed/won and closed/lost deals. Then analyse the differences between top performers and underperformers. This is the advice in an article on the business2community.com website.
It may be the case that many of your underperformers lose their deal in a particular pipeline stage. Or the reasons for losing a deal may significantly differ. Findings like these are necessary if you really want to reveal what sets your top performers apart. Then you can provide actionable coaching to the sales reps who are not doing so well.
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