4 Tips to Equip Your Sales Team for Success

Sales revenue is the lifeblood of business, but many companies’ sales teams are on life support. Nearly two in five sales representatives do not hit their sales quotas, a Qvidian survey found. Nine in ten sales professionals say meeting quotas is one of their executive management’s top goals. Failing to close, being burdened with too many non-sales tasks and failing to communicate value rank among the leading causes of failing to meet quota.

Improving these results should be a top priority of any sales team. Here are four steps you can take to better equip your sales team to meet their quotas and achieve your company’s revenue goals.

Set up a Reliable Mobile Sales Platform

With smartphones representing the most important way of communicating with prospective buyers, having a suitable mobile sales platform forms a foundation for sales success. For sales professionals, a smartphone needs to support several key functions, says sales trainer Thomas Phelps. A sales-oriented smartphone should make it easy to communicate with clients via emails, texting and social media, making devices with large screens and keypads preferable. A sales smartphone should also support time management and calendar management apps, as well as apps specifically geared toward sales, such as CRM apps. If your sales representative needs to process point-of-sales purchases, ability to support mobile payment processing may be another desirable feature.

In addition to having the right smartphone, it’s important to have a reliable wireless carrier to ensure speedy communication with prospects without interruption. A wireless carrier with fast, reliable 4G LTE availability throughout your sales region is a must for successful mobile sales representatives.

Use an Effective CRM System

Another pillar of sales success is an effective customer relationship management app. CRM apps help you automate the sales process by providing a cloud-accessible database where your reps can use their mobile devices to view and deploy vital sales information. In addition to storing customer contact information, a good CRM tool should enable your sales team to mine prospecting information from websites and online resources, identify hot leads, track the history of a contact’s interactions with your sales team, and view their purchase history.

A sales CRM platform should also have features such as role-based user access that let your sales managers control how leads are delegated among team members. PCMag provides an online review of today’s leading CRM software tools, which include popular industry leaders such as Salesforce and Zoho as well as emerging rivals such as Base CRM and Bpm’online CRM.

Provide Supporting Resources

Sales teams rely heavily on strong supporting resources. Fifty percent of highly-performing sales teams utilize a heavily-structured, closely monitored sales process, compared to 28 percent of underperforming sales teams, a University of Southern California study found. Providing your sales teams with sales scripts and materials is essential to optimizing your sale process. It’s also vital to back up your field reps with sales support staff who can assist with tasks such as managing communications with prospects, scheduling sales meetings and providing information from customer accounts.

Hold Regular Motivational and Training Sessions

Successful sales representatives are fueled by an optimistic drive to achieve, and providing training that nourishes this quality can boost your company’s revenue results. Eighty percent of sales managers rate a representatives drive to achieve as the most important key to their performance, and companies that focus their training on instilling a drive to achieve experience 20 percent higher sales results, a study by Integrity Solutions and the Sales Management Association found. Schedule regular motivational meetings to keep your team’s drive to succeed high. Include periodic training sessions on key skills such as how to close and how to handle objections. Providing solid training and motivational support can make the difference between mediocre underperformance and spectacular sales results.