As the manager of a sales team, your priorities have shifted from making sales to ensuring your team is equipped to do so. Only 34% of sales teams reach their quotas, making it a sales manager’s job to remove obstacles that stop your team from achieving the goals set out for them.

Your position allows you to spot challenges and provide them with the tools to help them to achieve their full potential.

Whether you look after a B2C or B2B sales team, here are some tips to help you make sure they meet their KPIs.

5 Tips to Help your Sales Team Meet their KPIs

1. Set your Sales Team Up for Success

According to Salesforce, “today’s sales professionals spend just 34% of their time selling.” If your team is spending time using outdated databases or working with clunky tools, they’re losing valuable selling time. By ensuring they have the tools to do their job efficiently, you’ll put them in a better position.

Review your tools and processes

To make sure they have the tools they need to succeed, review what you are currently using and decide whether it’s time to run an audit.

Your database is an important place to start. Having a view of customers across all channels and engagements with your company is important to success in sales.

Source

The graph above shows that the majority of sales professionals believe it’s very important or critical to connect with customers across multiple channels. Without good data management, you’re making it very difficult for your team to connect with potential customers and track their interactions effectively.

If your database is out of date, with inactive contacts or incorrect information, run a data cleaning or data enrichment project. It’s a good idea to work alongside the marketing team, so you can agree on a process for capturing and storing data in a single place.

Most KPIs involve collecting and managing leads. Your team can use a mechanism for simple lead capture. Using an online lead capture form that integrates with your contact database or CRM tool takes out the manual work behind lead generation, allowing them to get on with selling.

There are plenty of tools out there to make selling easier and to help your team meet their goals - whether it’s a routing app to help save them time on-the-go, or upgrading the analytics within your CRM to help them streamline their strategy.

2. Create a Positive Work Environment

A good manager leads by example. In simple terms, this means offering clear and consistent communication, transparency, and accountability. Show your team the qualities you want to be reflected.

Job satisfaction

Looking beyond that, your role as a manager should involve helping your team members achieve maximum job satisfaction.

A recent study showed that job satisfaction is accountable for 36.7% percent of job performance. While this might seem like a problem for them to overcome, you can help achieve overall better job performance by making it part of your goals, which means getting them closer to meeting their KPIs.

Unfortunately, job satisfaction isn’t the norm for many. A 2018 survey by Marc Wayshak found only 17.6% of respondents rate their job satisfaction as "outstanding" and 47.1% rated their jobs as just "good.”

There’s no silver bullet for achieving job satisfaction, or for helping your team members get there, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Your team should have a deep understanding of personal and shared goals- not just what they entail, but how to get there and what this results in. This means working towards it feels like progress, rather than the daily grind.
• Ensure a shared respect for boundaries. When work-life leaks into home life, it’s easy to become resentful. Be respectful of their boundaries, and enforce this balance where possible across your team. This means no meetings outside of working hours, and providing flexibility when it’s reasonable to do so, such as working from home, or shifting their working hours.
• They need a clear grasp of the expectations of their role -what they are required to do and how they should achieve it. Provide your expectations for the outcomes, but allow your team to find the path that works for them in order to get there. 

If your team isn’t happy in their role, doesn’t understand their core goals, and lacks knowledge of what their role requires, meeting their KPIs feels like an impossible task.

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3. Help Them Connect with other Departments

In a leadership position within your company, you are in a position to help your team better connect with other teams. 77% of salespeople say selling collaboratively with other departments is important.

This could cover anything from capturing information to understanding customer satisfaction. Work with other heads of departments such as marketing or customer service to refine your processes and ensure your workflows are efficient when they run across teams.

A Salesforce survey revealed that 60% of sales professionals say collaborative selling has increased productivity by more than 25%.

To provide more collaborative working, unpick any silos within your organization and ensure your team is working in harmony with teams across the business.  If you aren’t already using task management software, you may want to consider it, especially if your team is working on shared projects across the business. It enables everyone to keep track and monitor progress in a central place.

4. Support Career Development

Every year expectations of a sales representative increases. Their KPIs get more challenging, but they haven’t been provided with the tools in order to ‘level-up’ their tactics. It gets harder and harder to achieve their goals.

Providing opportunities for upskilling and training can help your team achieve bigger and better goals year on year, not to mention help your team keep abreast of the ever-changing climate of sales. 61% of salespeople say selling is harder or much harder today than it was 5 years ago. 

While providing training for your team can seem like a big time and money investment upfront, it can bring you a huge 353% ROI according to Accenture.

5. Constantly Review and Give Feedback

Regular feedback sessions are essential in keeping your sales team on the right track, as well as providing opportunities for either party to raise concerns or potential issues relating to their KPIs.

Your sales teams’ progress is not something to be reviewed just once a quarter. Weekly or monthly check-ins are important in keeping your team motivated and spotting areas to provide additional support.

The graphic below shows the key to providing effective feedback. The crucial factors are giving clear steps, neutral delivery, consistent and regular communication.

Summary

Helping a sales team meet their KPIs isn’t about making it easy.It’s about clearing the way for them to do it as effectively as possible. Remove as many of the obstacles as you can, and when obstacles remain in their path, provide them with support and a positive environment so they are in the best position to overcome them. To recap:

1. Provide the right tools
2. Create a healthy work environment
3. Build bridges with other teams
4. Allow your team to upskill
5. Give continuous feedback

With these 5 strategies, you can create a healthy dynamic for your sales team, priming them to achieve success. Once this becomes the norm, you can enhance your tactics, technologies, and knowledge gathering to continue to see success.