As a sales manager or leader, you have a one-line job description: to make your sales team as successful as possible. In order to be a great leader, you first need to build trust within your team. Then, you’ll need to figure out what needs to be done to maximize everyone’s performance and potential. From our years of experience working with sales professionals, we’ve learned a lot about the secrets of successful sales leaders.

5 Secrets of Successful Sales Leaders:

There are five key fundamentals that all leaders need to do effectively to develop and maintain a successful sales team:

1. Make sure that each team member has a well-defined game plan with very specific activities and results goals. Many sales people are “winging it” every day; there is no rhyme or reason to how they are spending their time and focusing their efforts on a daily and weekly basis. As a leader, it is critical that you help your direct reports develop a strategic 30-60-90 day game plan.  Once you have established clear expectations, you need to hold them accountable to these goals on a regular basis and inspect what you expect.
2. Engage in regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings with each individual on your team. This is one of your best opportunities to help develop your sales associates.  Use this time to review their progress against the goals, help strategize on how to best move accounts through the pipeline, pre-call plan and debrief on appointments, roll play, coach and counsel, as well as encourage and motivate your direct reports.
3. Go on frequent “field rides” to join your sales reps out in the field and view them in action. Going out with a team member for an entire day will give you an indication of how they plan their days, as well as the process they are going through on their appointments. It also allows you the opportunity to provide effective feedback on the spot, which is instrumental in their development. BDU’s Curbside Critique is a wonderful free tool you can use.
4. Hold effective, well planned and regularly scheduled sales team meetings. These meetings should be held on a weekly or monthly basis either in person (ideally) or on a conference call, and should provide the setting for sharing updates on products or processes, training and roll playing.  This is also a great opportunity to recognize top performers and share best practices.
5. Make sure you are utilizing reporting and are managing off of information to help determine triage areas for individuals as well as your entire team. Triage is methodology to uncover what three areas if improved upon will have the biggest impact on performance.  Once you have identified the triage areas, you can then determine what you can do to close the gaps.  BDU’s Sales Team and Sales Person analysis are great tools to help you with your Triage Analysis.

BDU offers Outsourced Sales Management, which is perfect for organizations that don’t have a sales manager in place, as well as for companies where the sales manager has too big of a span of control and needs additional help supplementing efforts.

Contact us to find out more about how BDU’s Outsourced Sales Management can transform your sales team into a revenue-generating powerhouse to ensure long-term business success.

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