Owning your own business is the dream of many people, but not everyone knows that an entrepreneur needs a lot of dedication, patience and to study a lot in order to manage and keep everything in order.
Especially in businesses that have a sales team, the entrepreneur must always be aware of the best ways to help increase the team’s productivity.
For this, it’s vital to keep track of what your employees are doing, to ensure that everyone works with the same professional goals and values.
Keeping the team aligned helps both the professional satisfaction of employees and the outcome of sales.
After all, those who work with a well-defined purpose, trust in the work of colleagues and feel part of a good team, are more likely to be motivated and happy with what they do.
This professional well-being therefore helps improve the performance of employees in their activities.
However, we know that it’s not always easy to figure out what to do to improve results.
5 strategies you should use to increase your sales team’s productivity.
Understand the process of selling your business well
An entrepreneur must understand all the processes that happen inside their company before interfering in any area.
This ensures that the changes proposed will be consistent with the work performed by the team and that employees will have all the resources needed to implement whatever is needed.
If your idea is to tinker in the sales arena to increase your team’s productivity, it’s critical that you know:
- How sales are being made;
- Who is responsible for each action;
- What strategies are being used;
- How to take feedback;
- Among other factors.
Having this knowledge helps you to be more assertive in the decisions and transmit a feeling of confidence to your employees to become the reference figure in case of doubts or suggestions.
The idea is not to monopolize all the knowledge of the company in a single person, nor to withdraw the autonomy of the employees or to control everything that is done, but to have knowledge of how things work.
View your enterprise as a system and know exactly what each industry does to make sure everything works well.
Hire better people than you
When it comes to hiring, you need to seek out people who have skills that neither you nor the other employees have, to complement the work and add value to the business.
So before you start recruiting, identify your own strengths and weaknesses and all the people who work with you.
List all the skills your business requires and which it still can’t attend to, to know where you’ll need reinforcement.
With all this information in hand, it’s easier to find the most capable and authoritative people in the niche you serve to meet your team’s needs.
Think that as hard as you are and be prepared to assume the greatest responsibility within the company, you may need to be absent at times.
Without really qualified decision makers, it’s hard to keep up with business when you’re out or busy.
Having people more qualified than you at certain points is also good for bringing news to the work environment and contributing to the personal and professional growth of all involved.
After all, the exchange of information and experiences among colleagues is one of the best ways to transmit tacit knowledge, that is, knowledge that comes from experiences and can not be formally registered.
Identify the bottlenecks in your sales process
Often, entrepreneurs think they will need to change the entire sales process in order to improve results. So they start implementing new projects, making changes, hiring new employees or even firing people.
However, this is not always what you need to do to increase your team’s productivity.
Before changing everything, look closely at each step to try to identify if there are any errors or procedures that can be improved.
Sometimes the process of attracting and nurturing leads is flowing well, people are showing interest in your brand, but the moment the customer reaches the sales team, things go bad.
Here, the error may be in the approach, in the product itself, in the payment conditions or in any other factor directly related to the purchase decision.
It may also be that the fault lies at the beginning of the customer’s journey. In that case, the approach is totally different as you will need to tailor your marketing strategies to improve your image in the market and attract more customers.
This bottleneck identification is critical to understanding what you need to do to increase your team’s productivity assertively and avoid unnecessary spending.
Training
We’ve just talked about how essential it is to know how to spot bugs in order to get them fixed and optimize your actions.
However, more important than that is to prevent these bottlenecks from existing within your business.
Of course you can not guarantee 100% success in any company, after all, those who carry the business forward are people and we all fail from time to time.
But there is an excellent strategy for minimizing the occurrence of errors and ensuring that work is always done in the best possible way: business training.
Training the people who work in your company is a way to keep the team up to date, motivated and prepared to perform all the activities that the job demands.
Fortunately, the importance of investing in training and people development is a consensus in today’s business environment, so it’s increasingly easier to find and implement truly effective business programs.
Here are some of the types of training for companies:
- Workshops and lectures;
- Gamification;
- Online coaching;
- Coaching;
- Mentoring programs etc.
For training to be really effective, you need to know exactly what your goals are, the people that will be included, the time available for it, and how much you can invest in it.
Only then will you be able to choose the right option to increase your team’s productivity and boost sales.
Use technology in your favor
Have you stopped to think about how much time your team can save through the automation of some processes?
We know that it’s common for entrepreneurs to be afraid to invest in technology, especially when financial resources are limited.
However, having a few automatic systems in your business can help you save time and money and still greatly facilitate your team’s work.
Processes such as registration, payment and marketing, for example, have many bureaucratic and standardized details.
When this work is done manually, the company must have employees available to fill in data and do some activities that, however simple they may be, require time and attention.
When these processes are automated, employees have more time to devote to more complex functions, which require their skills and abilities to be successfully completed.
Not to mention that when these procedures are done manually, the chance of errors is much greater.
In the end, relying on technology can be more lucrative than it seems, moreover because these automations are often affordably priced and simple installations.
Help develop your team
Of course, if you want to increase your team’s productivity, you will seek all existing solutions to improve the business, optimize processes and eliminate errors.
Relying on technology and reducing unnecessary bureaucracies are just some of the attitudes you can take to make work more agile and dynamic.
However, you should understand that your focus should also be on the people you work with.
It’s no use having the best systems within your company if your employees don’t know how to use them or aren’t motivated enough to do their best work.
So one of the most effective strategies to improve your bottom line is to invest in people. You need to ensure that they’re satisfied with their jobs and prepared for all the challenges it imposes.
We talked about the importance of training people, remember? Invest in this and you’ll see an increase in your team’s productivity, as well as a climate change within your company.
To learn more about this subject, check out 6 training and staff development techniques that you can implement in your business.
Guest post produced by the team at Hotmart.