10 Ways to Improve Your Sales Performance
There is no magic bullet to improve your sales performance, but there are essential strategies for identifying more leads and closing more sales. We compiled the essential list for you.
Last year, more than 40% of sales professionals missed their sales goals. If your team is in that 40%, you need to improve your sales performance – and fast.
Read on to discover ten powerful ways to improve your sales performance.
How to Measure Sales Performance
Sales performance isn’t hard to measure. In fact, there are several different metrics you can use to evaluate the performance of your sales team as a whole and of reps individually.
The most useful metrics for measuring sales performance include the following:
- Current revenue (vs. plan and prior year)
- Number of deals closed (vs. plan and prior year)
- Conversion rate
- Opportunity win rate
- Market share
Salesforce CRM can be extremely useful for measuring your team’s sales performance. Take full advantage of Salesforce’s many dashboards and reports to not only track sales performance but also analyze that performance to gain actionable insights.
10 Powerful Ways to Improve Sales Performance
Improving sales performance is the name of the game for most businesses today. Whether you’re looking to recover revenue lost during the COVID pandemic, gain market share against fierce competitors, or just grow your business, juicing the performance of your sales reps and entire sales team is how you do it.
With that in mind, here are ten things you can do to improve your company’s sales performance. They all make a big difference.
1. Have a Plan
To both motivate and measure the performance of your sales force you must create a detailed sales plan. It’s not enough to have just a top-line goal; your plan must include specific goals and strategies to achieve those goals. Depending on your business, your sales goals might include:
- Leads generated
- Calls per day/month/quarter
- Number of deals closed, revenue per deal, and total revenue generated
- Average profit per sale
2. Hire the Best People
Hiring the top sales talent is a sure-fire way to improve your team’s overall sales performance. Make sure the reps you hire are experienced in your market and knowledgeable of the types of accounts you service. Look for specific experience and personality traits that best fit the way you do business.
3. Structure for Success
It’s also important to structure your sales force in a way that results in the best overall performance. Certain sales models are better suited to certain industries and markets. You may also want to think outside the box and structure by market potential rather than by region. Assigning your top salespeople to your highest-potential areas will most often generate the highest results.
4. Train to Win
Even the best salespeople need the training to realize their full potential. Frequent sales training is essential to keep your reps informed and motivated – and it pays off. Research shows that for every dollar a company spends on sales training, it gets about $4.53 back in return.
5. Understand Customer Needs
The better you understand the needs of your customers the more you can focus your sales efforts – and achieve stronger top and bottom-line results. Deloitte and Touche research reveals that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than their less customer-centric competitors. Recognize your customers’ needs and then have your sales team show how your products and services can best meet those needs.
6. Deliver a Superior Customer Experience
Customers interact with not just your sales reps but with multiple people at multiple places in your company. You want to create a superior customer experience across all these touchpoints, whether that’s in marketing, sales, support, or accounting – in person, over the phone, and online. If customers enjoy their interactions with your company they’ll keep coming back. If they have a bad experience, you could lose them for life.
7. Work Your Referrals
According to Sales Insights Lab, 47% of top sales performers consistently ask for referrals, while only 26% of lesser performers do so. To boost your sales performance, make sure your reps are building a robust referral network – and working those referrals to develop new leads and customers.
8. Stay Aware – and Ahead – of the Competition
It’s easy to become internally focused and ignore what the competition is doing. It’s especially difficult in a growing market, where sales growth can happen even if you’re losing market share. You want to both increase your sales and grow your market share, which means staying aware of what your competition is doing, both good and bad. Don’t let them get ahead of you without responding as quickly as possible.
9. Employ Data-Driven Decision Making
If you’re like most companies, you collect a wealth of sales and customer data. You should use that data not only to analyze past performance but to help drive your business going forward. Use that data to help you make better-informed decisions. Data collection should lead to data analysis, which should lead to actionable insights for your business.
To facilitate data-driven decision-making, employ business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA) techniques and technologies. BI and BA can help your organization track performance, optimize operations, and improve your sales strategy and long-term planning.
The following video reveals some of the secrets of data-driven decision-making.
10. Deploy a Robust CRM Platform
One of the most effective ways to improve sales performance is to utilize customer relationship management (CRM) software. A robust CRM platform helps you collect and analyze customer and sales data, manage customer interactions, and improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales team. It’s essential for growing your business in today’s competitive market.
Bonus Tip: Let Rainmaker Help You Get the Most From Salesforce CRM
When you want to deploy Salesforce CRM and get the most value from your investment, turn to the Salesforce experts at Rainmaker. We can help you integrate Salesforce into your business, manage your sales processes, and track sales performance. We offer a wide variety of Salesforce Managed Services to help your company generate more and better leads, build closer customer relationships, and improve your sales performance.
Contact Rainmaker today to learn more about using Salesforce CRM to improve sales performance!
