Two co workers doing a high five

Sales Team Management: 5 Best Tips for Success

5 Best Tips for Managing Your Sales Team

Whether you’re a veteran manager with a sales team in a slump, or you’re new to the field, it’s useful to take a look at what’s working for others. Great sales team management requires that the person in charge understands what it’s like to be on both ends of the cold call. That’s beside all the usual business administration tasks, too. Here we present the five most valuable tips we can offer for any sales manager who needs some fresh air.

5: 1-on-1 training is indispensable.

Sales training is what makes everything else possible. It doesn’t matter whether one of your team members is a rookie or a 30-year sales veteran. Technology has made many old tactics obsolete, but many core principles remain constant. Everyone on your team needs knowledge of both. What’s more, they need to know that you care about the efforts of each one of them. Not the aggregate, but the individual’s performance. No matter how well the team is doing, each salesperson wants to know, “are my efforts appreciated and effective?” You need to give them that feedback personally. You also need to be humble enough to learn from them. Listen to their experiences, and factor them into the training.

4: Quality beats quantity, but you need high volume to find enough good clients.

Aim high, but do it with a laser, not a shotgun. Train your reps to focus on qualifying questions to gauge genuine interest, rather than pitching everything that moves. If a lead is really not interested, move on to the next one. Help them make as many calls and send as many emails as they possibly can each day to reach that point. The reason for this is that a few high-interest prospects will end up doing far more for your organization than the dozens of mildly intrigued ones ever will. At the end of the day, the purpose of sales is revenue, not just brand recognition.

3: Boost motivation by rewarding both effort and results

A lot of sales team management advice focuses heavily on results, and with good reason. As we just noted, revenue matters. But how do you get revenue? Through work. What is work? It’s an important question. In sales, work is not just pitching and closing. It’s also the hundreds of hangups, voicemails, and “no’s” you have to slog through to get to a yes. And as every successful salesperson can attest, the best closed deals always follow the worst rejections. So, consider rewarding the objections! “What?” you ask. No, really. Give your sales team an incentive to get rejected as much as possible, so they can find the “yesses” faster:
“Every time someone got a no, we tracked it in our system, and the person with the most no’s received a $100 gift card every week… The more no’s you get, the closer you are to getting a yes. The prize of getting a yes is way larger than $100, so you still wanted to get there. This nearly doubled our outbound calls and motivated the whole team.” — Dan McGraw, CEO of Fuelzee
Have a look at the other suggestions in that link from Dan Sincavage’s SalesHacker article. Decide what strategy will work best for your organization, but one way or another, make it easier for your team to work harder.

2: Transparency x Competition = Progress

Your team will want to work harder when they can see who’s doing the best at any given moment. Humans naturally love to compete with each other, and we love to win. Making sure that the metrics, goals, and results are visible to everyone encourages it, and actually helps everybody do better. Don’t keep secrets when it comes to reaching company goals. Let the team know how things are really going. Evaluate progress together and 1-on-1. Make sure that top performers share with others the tactics that make them successful. Give and receive feedback. Iterate and innovate!

1: Remember that every member of your team is unique

Possibly the biggest key to excellent sales team management is this. Get to know the individual combinations of strengths ans weaknesses of every member of your team. There’s no such thing as a perfect salesperson, certainly not for every possible situation. You must recognize that some salespeople are better at building from the ground up, whereas others will be awesome only if they are joining an established campaign. Some will be better suited to high-value activities like closing deals; make these your account executives. Some will be rockstars at high-volume activities, like cold calls and sending warmed-up prospects along the funnel. Let them specialize as SDRs, and make it worth their while! There are many other ways someone can specialize in a sales role. Get familiar with them, and put them in the right place to make your whole operation as successful as possible.

Bonus Sales Team Management Tip:

Boom Demand does all of this for you! We build our Sales Development teams with talented individuals who have proven their ability to make your sales process faster and more effective. Contact us today to start enjoying a more successful sales funnel!
Dart hitting the bulls eye

Target Market Discovery Depends on Problem Solving

How Do You Find The Right Target Market for Your Software Product?

No business gets very far without knowing who they’re selling their products to. Some software companies have managed to appeal to an enormous target market. Social media and search companies are well-known for this, but they didn’t start out that way. Facebook started out with a very small and specific market: Harvard University students. Only later was the product’s greater potential apparent. Most successful software companies start out with a similar tight focus.

What Problem are You Solving?

The key is to do things in the right order. A common mistake is to try focusing on an enormous target market with a wide range of interests, needs, and problems. There are millions and millions of software products out there now whose creators are just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks. The better strategy is to make sure that your software is solving a known problem. That is, a problem that has been clearly identified as a pain point for someone. It should be a problem that is likely to occur for many organizations, and your market research should prove that indeed it does. Ideally, you’ll be the first to solve that problem. If you aren’t, then your software should do it significantly better than whoever’s already leading the market. Otherwise, no one will have any reason to switch.

Who Has That Problem?

That brings us to the next point. To help your sales efforts, it’s a good idea to make sure that your target market operates in an industry that interests you and that you can relate to. Carl Mattiola points out why:
Which industries do you believe in? Which ones would you love to help? Which ones would you be happy to talk to every. single. day. ???   You are gonna be in business with these people so you really have to love it.   If you don’t you may get bored and self-sabotage any success you have.
For a more practical take on this point, Phil Morettini has this to say:
Of course, it’s better to choose a market segment where you know the lay of the land and have some existing contacts–than not. Sometimes this can be a little-overblown, though. I’ve moved into many markets where I previously had no experience or contacts with great success. And in the software/tech business, things can change very quickly. If you aren’t open to recognizing change, that “existing market knowledge” might already be dated and that knowledge that gives you so much comfort can actually work against you. Imo, it’s usually far more important to have the ability to go into a market segment and size it up accurately and quickly, than it is to have actual experience there. But all things considered, assuming you don’t get over-confident in your market knowledge, having existing contacts and past experience in a market segment can be very helpful.

Accelerating Target Market Identification

Boom Demand considers this the first crucial step for all of our clients. If you don’t already know your market, we help you find it. Once it’sidentified, we help you reach out to potential clients fast with our sales development teams, SEO work on your online content, and other strategies that help you hit the ground running. Contact us today to start!
Bank Vault

Software Sales Boosting Without Breaking the Bank

How to Grow Your Software Sales Without Breaking the Bank

Your B2B marketing efforts are key to making sure you find customers who need your software. Marketing has its costs, though, and like everything in business, there’s a risk of missing the target. How can you make sure that you reach your software sales goals without wasting your budget? The answer may be simpler than you’d expect.

Nothing Sells Itself

There’s plenty of talk out there about the power of the freemium business model, where you offer just enough basic services for free to hook your prospect, while the most useful features wait behind a paywall. It’s been enormously successful for all kinds of SaaS companies, and it’s clear why. Some have gone so far as to say that these platforms sell themselves. It would be easy to get caught in a trap of thinking that business strategies like this could even eliminate the need for marketing, but that’s not so. It begs the question of how the users even found out about the free product in the first place.

Information Distribution

The simple truth about all software sales is this: nobody knows about your product until you tell them about it. One way or another, you need marketing. Whether it’s by guest posting on a blog, traditional ad campaigns, social media outreach, or even old-fashioned cold calling with a modern twist, you have to sell your stuff. It’s important to figure out which of these methods will work best for your brand. Different products call for different approaches.

Boom Demand Makes Software Sales Simple

All of those different approaches take time and money to implement, whatever way you slice it. You can’t get around that. What you can do, though, is avoid the high costs of doing it all in-house. Boom Demand’s nearshore and offshore resources make our clients’ software sales way easier than they expect. Our professional teams of trained Sales Development Representatives have the experience and the raw sales talent needed to get your name out where it counts: in your clients’ ears and in front of their eyes. By phone, email, and social media, we market your brand, your way. Contact us today to start saving money while growing sales faster than ever before!