Building Sales Organization

7 Steps To Building Your Sales Organization

Building a high performing sales team that exceeds all corporate objectives is essential for any business.  Your sellers are not only the front lines driving customer perceptions about your company, but are the critical path to sustainable results.

As a Sales Manager or Corporate Executive, focusing your efforts around setting a clear path to success, providing the proper training for every seller, and determining the correct methods of motivation, will ensure you consistently exceed all of your business objectives.

There are seven key areas every leader should thoughtfully organize their strategy around while building exceptional sales and support teams.  Drive consistency in all actions and accountability throughout the organization.

1. Culture

Instill your company mission statement and corporate culture into all of your functional teams, especially your sellers. There are a lot of exceptional sales representatives in the market today, but understanding and aligning your corporate culture with each individual you hire will pay dividends as your business grows.

Build a “Sales Culture” – This means you are aligning the right sales support, operations and product development teams around the principals of sales execution.  Set the tone with all teams regarding the importance of sales success, as this will drive everyone’s day to day priorities and focus on the teamwork needed to execute.

Set your sellers up for success by surrounding them with motivated functional teams.  Incent great sales support by implementing regular award programs tied to the individual, function or corporate results.

Great sellers thrive when motivated both financially and through award recognition, ensure both are aggressive and consistently drive toward exceptional individual performance based results.

2. Talent

Know your target seller both with tangible and intangible characteristics.  Focus on the required experience criteria and create a set of interview questions that will give you the best understanding of their intangibles.  Set your compensation plan accordingly, ensure your top reps thrive allowing earning potential that will exceed the industry

3. The Market

To deliver the proper value proposition and positioning, understand your key differentiation to the competition, segmented target customer sets, cost basis for your product or service and profitability needed to drive the success factors for your business.

Know the available opportunity set, from either a customer count by segment or market revenue potential.  Back into performance expectations based on the available opportunity set.  If this is difficult to determine, place prior sales history as a benchmark targeting an annual growth rate you would like to see by rep or territory.

You should always look to the granularity of your financials, driving profitability in all deals the sales teams close.  Whether you are paying on a Gross Margin or Revenue basis, create a cost model providing your teams with some flexibility in price or structure throughout the negotiation process.

4. Value Proposition and Positioning

Develop a handful of customer segmented value propositions your teams should leverage.  This will provide relative control and consistency in how your product or service is publicized.  Push your sales teams to deliver the message in all training and onboarding exercises to the management teams, ensuring the proper forum for coaching all aspects of delivery.

Confidence is key in all sales messaging, so push for continuous repetition and refinement through the coaching sessions.  Mentor programs with successful reps is another valuable practice.

It’s always an awkward form to place a mirror in front of the seller, but body language is often as important as the message itself.  For inside sales reps, placing a mirror in front of their phones and pushing them to smile as they speak is an old practice that absolutely works

5. Pipeline Metrics

The science of sales is all about the numbers.  Pipeline management is critical to understanding if a small pivot is needed in your message, product set or the price of your product/service.

Start with Lead Generation and create a pipeline management model that will track conversion rates for each step of the process.  From Prospecting, Opportunity Management, Revenue to Existing Customer Growth; understand how business moves through the pipeline focusing on short timeframes and success benchmarks.

Track and review regularly lost opportunities asking your reps to provide detail about the reason.  Management teams should hold regular meetings to discuss both sides of the pipeline to ensure their offer is well positioned in the market.

6. Management

The core role of an exceptional manager is to “Train and Motivate”.  Consistency is always king when inspiring a team, but collaboration and an understanding of the hurdles they face will drive awareness by each individual to value their contributions as an effort towards the greater good of the company.

Regular sales meetings where you can take the pulse of your sellers and provide them with the encouragement needed to exceed all objectives is critical.  I suggest holding an early week meeting to help the team transition from a relaxing weekend into a motivated seller.  Reviewing weekly goals, a forum for feedback and highlight exceptional performances as a format for team motivation.

All sellers get told NO a lot, so the goal of a successful management team is to create an environment for positive motivation that will instill confidence in each rep.

Keep all aspects of both motivation and accountability on a short-term basis.  Instill the value of consistency each day working towards exceeding their short and long-term goals.

7. Reporting

Regular visibility to highlight top performers, an understanding of how the team is tracking to their overall goals and the evaluation of your current state of the business, will give you the insight needed to deliver consistent success.  Great sellers are goal oriented individuals who take pride in their results and always want to see how they are performing against other sellers in addition to contributions to the greater good of the organization.

Show your teams where the business stands and why their efforts are so valuable to the company.  Great employees look for purpose in their work, so make sure that they feel a part of the overall success of the business.