What does an effective sales team look like?

I am often asked this question and I think it should be changed to “what does an effective sales team sound like?” That’s easier to answer. I’m in a sales office at 08:00 in the morning and it’s noisy. Sales executives are making sales calls, they’re on headsets and waving arms in the air as they walk around.

Others are enthusiastically planning the morning’s calls and discussing the goals for today. Another group are reviewing yesterday’s objections and how they intend to respond. I can hear the usual banter, gossip and jokes mixed in with professional sales conversations. I can feel motivation and self-belief in the air and hear loud applause when sales figures are marked up on the whiteboard.

The trick is to maintain this for the whole day and then do it all again tomorrow. And the next day… So what has to be done to achieve this?

1. Recruit the right salespeople. Or hire the right people who demonstrate a capability for professional sales.
2. Create an environment for them to flourish and grow. Praise them when they’re successful, coach them when they’re not.
3. Appoint the right sales managers to establish a positive atmosphere where people believe they can not only achieve but exceed target. Salespeople need to encourage, enthuse and excite their prospect. Sales managers need to do precisely the same for their sales team.
4. Measure them on quality as well as quantity. It’s easy for sales managers to record the number of sales calls made but more challenging to assess the quality of a sales call. Yet revenue is achieved from quality sales conversations so the focus of assessing and developing sales individuals should be here as well as on the quantity of calls made.
5. Design and deliver the right training to support the skills platform for the sales team to deliver revenue and profit. Short burst sessions focussing on a topic for an hour. Role play workshops with feedback and coaching. Follow up discussions to check application and results. Little and often so that constant development becomes the norm.

Sales training improves performance which in turn improves revenue and profit. And we all know what revenue generation and profit creation sounds like…