Do you manage a sales team
or an organization that has a sales team
and you think to yourself, man,
I just feel like, with a couple of tweaks,
we could just see so many more sales?
That's one of the most common questions
that I get from managers is,
how can I make those small tweaks
that are going to allow my sales team
to sell significantly more?
What we see is that high-velocity sales teams are doing
certain things just a little bit differently.
It's not transformational.
It's just a couple of key differences.
So in this video, I'm going to show
you "Sales Management Training,
"9 Keys to Building a High-Velocity Sales Team".
Check it out.
(reflective music)
Number One- Scalable offering.
This is basically the starting point
into actually building a high-velocity sales organization
in the first place is, you must have an offering
that's actually scalable, that there's a product market fit,
people actually want or need what you have,
and so you're not just trying to jam
something down people's throats,
but there's really actually something there,
and that you can scale this.
Because if you don't have the right offering
for the right people, then trying
to scale this thing is just going
to be like building a house on a foundation made of clay.
We need to make sure that we have something in place that,
in some ways, kind of sells itself.
Now obviously if you're selling a service
or something that's invisible,
or maybe a product that's pretty commonly available,
it may not be that you can just kind
of throw it out into the market,
but you need to do the leg work,
so that way, your sales team is starting
with an advantage, and that starts with
that scalable offering.
Number Two- Career progression.
This is one of the biggest mistakes
that I see in organizations with sales teams all day long,
is that they're going out
and they're trying to just hire seasoned sales veterans,
and they're just hiring these people
to basically stay in this position
for the rest of their lives.
But the problem is is, A, it's really hard
to find seasoned sales veterans
that want to leave where they are,
because if they were that good,
why do they want to leave in the first place?
And B, most people, particularly in the younger generations,
want to see that career progression.
They want to know that, even if they start out lower,
they want to see that
they can achieve higher levels of success.
And so creating a situation where
you have real career progression,
where someone can start out as, let's say,
a business development rep, and then,
if they're successful in that role,
then they can move on to an account executive,
or basically the closer.
And then, from there, if they're really successful
in that role, they can move on to sales manager, and so on,
and director, and VP, or whatever it is.
Creating that obvious career progression is going
to allow you to really hire top-performing talent
at the lower levels, people who are
more in that kind of sales entry level
that can prove themselves, learn about your company,
learn about your processes,
and then develop into that high-performing salesperson.
Number Three- Right people.
This may sound obvious, but we need
to have the right people in the right roles.
Because I see sales managers and sales leaders,
all time, say, "Oh, man, I just can't get
"my people to really close."
And it's like, well, are they the right people
in the first place?
Maybe not.
You need to have people that are athletes.
We always think of this in terms of sports.
If you want to feel the team,
you've got to start with people who are at least athletic.
They don't have to be necessarily experts
in the particular game you're playing,
but you need to have people that are pretty athletic,
and that's true of sales, too.
You've got to hire the right people
who can grow into the position,
but really have the potential,
the eagerness, the drive, the will,
all of that, and that starts, again,
by having that career progression,
that you can show to those right people,
and having a process for
really hiring the right people consistently.
Number Four- Align incentives.
Some of the biggest barriers
to creating a truly high-velocity sales team is that,
if we don't have a clear alignment of
what the company wants to accomplish
with what is going to reward the salesperson
for their efforts, then we're not going to get there.
So we want to have a situation
where the compensation, and in particular,
the commission, is really rewarding the right behaviors.
So that means if you want people
to be creating their own leads,
well, then we've got to incentivize people to do that.
And so typically we're going to be breaking out teams
and roles, so you've got the people
that are more in the lead generation side,
and they're going to be rewarded
for setting appointments, and then
you've got the account executives, or the closers,
and they're going to be incentivized to close deals,
and so on.
So by aligning the incentives appropriately,
now we're making sure that,
even when people are working from home
and you're not watching them every day
and you don't know what exactly the hours
that they're working, you know
that you have aligned incentives,
so that way, if you've got the right person,
who's a go-getter, they're going to march forward.
Number Five- Lead gen.
This may sound, again, pretty trite,
but if we don't have a lead generation process in place,
most sales teams really struggle.
And so lead gen can be that
you have a business development team,
that their sole job is to basically schedule appointments
for your closers, or maybe you have
just a really strong marketing group
that can also schedule appointments for your closers.
But what we don't typically want to do
in today's world of selling is ask
your closers to be generating their own leads.
Now, they can be doing some things,
like leveraging referrals and introductions
to get just a couple of extra appointments on top,
or leveraging client relationships
to get those extra appointments.
But ultimately you don't want to have
your closers doing that cold prospecting,
because A, they're typically not very good at it,
and B, they really don't want to do it.
And what we want to do is make sure
that they're doing what we actually want
them to do, which is closing deals.
So by having a strong lead gen process in place,
the processes just work so much more smoothly.
Number Six- Sales process.
So this goes back to having that career progression.
Now, if you're hiring people that are super senior
and they're coming in, they're going to bring
their own sales process, but obviously
what that comes with is a lot of baggage.
And so typically what we see
with high-velocity sales teams is
that they're bringing in people
who are relatively newer in their career,
and then they're providing them
with the sales process to follow.
And so, that way, you can train them
on the process that you want them to use.
They're having the types of conversations
that you want them to have,
and ultimately you're speaking with the same vocabulary.
So when a sale doesn't go well,
now we have the right vocabulary
to really understand whether those salespeople did
what they really should've done
in any particular situation, and that all starts by
really having an organizational sales process.
Number Seven- Organized system.
Now this is pretty boring and not that fun,
but I see sales organizations all the time are
not really using their CRM system
to the best of its ability,
or they don't even use a CRM system that well,
or maybe they have a bunch of Google Docs
or Excel spreadsheets, or they're
just using that CRM system, but just absolutely
at a minimal level.
We want to make sure that we're organizing
all of these systems, and it's not just CRM.
It's what are you using for your cold email outreach?
What are you using for your phone systems?
And how does that all organize
into one smooth stack of technology
that is allowing the salespeople
to do as little operational
and administrative work and really ultimately focused
on what you want them to do, which is sell?
Number Eight- Coaching.
We all say, oh, yeah, of course.
Well, we do lots of coaching.
But what I find is that most sales managers
and sales leaders do much less coaching
than they really should.
They get mired, just like salespeople do,
in the administrative stuff.
So do the sales leaders and sales managers.
They're doing so much more administrative stuff
and they're not really doing what actually matters,
which is coaching.
The number one activity that
any sales manager can do is coach.
If you are not consistently coaching your reps,
then you're not really doing your job as a sales leader.
And so that typically means using some certain technologies,
like obviously call recording or Zoom recording,
or making sure that you're recording
those sales interactions, and then you're taking
your reps through a process of actually watching
themselves on the tape.
It reminds me of when I played college football.
Our coach was literally taping the practices,
and you would watch it right after
you practiced, and then you'd just kind
of take off a certain set, and you'd dog it,
and then the coach would say, "Well,
"what happened here, Wayshak?"
And the tape doesn't lie.
When we're coaching to a call recording
or to a Zoom recording, now we really have
something to really see and help them develop
and really create their own path for growth.
Number Nine- Accountability.
So this ties in a lot of what we already talked in together.
We want to have these processes in place,
so that way, we can really hold
our reps accountable to what we want them to do.
So that means having the types of conversations
that we want them to have, doing the type
of sales activity that we want them to do,
sending out enough proposals
or making sure they're moving people
through the sales pipeline as quickly
as they need to be going through.
Having all of these systems in place
and really having some metrics
that we're holding people accountable to,
now it actually, in a weird way,
it takes a lot of pressure off the managers,
because by just having the metrics in place,
now the reporting basically does
a lot of that accountability and management work for you,
because we're not constantly checking
in on what people are doing.
It's already there.
We can see exactly what's happening.
So there is the "Sales Management Training,
"9 Keys to Building a High-Velocity Sales Team".
And if you enjoyed this video,
then I have an amazing free training
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