How to Get Better Performance Out of Your Sales Team

How do you get better performance from your sales team? 

Pause, Reflect, Refine, Advance 

Better Performance

I hear the same thing from sales leaders over and over. “I want my team to perform better.” 

You want them to hit their quotas and even exceed them. But they aren’t. 

So why aren’t they hitting their goals?

The reasons may be different for each salesperson, but the bigger problem is they don’t know why and you may not either.  

More

In order to get better performance, we tend to think they need to do more.  

• If they just make a few more calls 
• If they just send more emails 
• If they just make a few more LinkedIn connections  

Better

Consider this, you may need to stop pushing the “more” button and start pushing the “better” button.  

It is true, sometimes salespeople do need to do more. Those metrics should be looked at because if they’re not doing enough to start with, you must get them started. But, sometimes doing more is not better. Their interactions need to be of higher quality.  

Better would be: 

• Contact more qualified prospects 
• Conduct better research on prospects 
• Create a better approach with their first interactions 

If your salespeople have 50 prospects to pursue, is giving them 60 going to be better? Probably not.  

I’d rather they attempted to make contact with 25 prospects that were well researched and prepared for and reach 10 than make 50 and reach 1.  

I have a simple 4 step process to help you decide what is needed to get “better” performance from your sales team you watch the video here or scroll to keep reading:  

1. Pause: In this busy world, we constantly are go go going. We don’t slow down and take the time we need to be able to reflect on things. So, hit the pause button. 

2. Reflect: Once you hit the pause button, reflect. 

Ask yourself: 

• What was just completed?  
• How was it completed?  
• Was it done well?  
• Is there something that could be done better next time?  

If you pause and reflect you will have the information you need to refine, which is the next step. 

3. Refine: Does anything need to change? Can your process or activity be refined? How can you do it better the next time?  

4. Advance: We improve, get better.  We do things better, smarter, and more efficiently.  We get better results. 

Bonus Step: Repeat frequently and teach your sales team to use this 4 step process.  

Now, this isn’t just to improve your sales team. You can use these 4 steps yourself to improve your leadership and coaching skills, to improve your meetings or get better performance yourself. 

This process can take a few minutes or as long as needed to examine how things are being done and how they can be improved. Use these techniques after an activity, in the middle day, the end of the day and the end of the week.  

If you continue in this way, you will absolutely get better performance because you will be able to not only determine what’s working and what’s not but improve what’s not. 

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If you would like to learn more about getting “better” performance from your sales team, watch my session from the Sales Development Summit! And then call me to schedule time to discuss what you can do.