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The Anatomy of a High Performing Sales Team
In order for your sales team to perform at their peak, you need to first reverse engineer what sales reps NEED from you to perform at the highest level. What would the perfect sales team look like?
They would be making infinite sales, instantly, with 0 roadblocks stopping them from doing so, and they would be infinitely motivated to continue doing that forever. Now that's perfection. But how can we use this definition to identify reality?
- Sales reps need to make more sales
- Sales reps need to be able to continue to do sales related activities without roadblocks
- Sales reps need to be motivated to continue doing their job and growing their career with you
We have to hit these points in order for our sales team to theorietically perform at the highest level. Now lets dive into 3 tactical things you can implement TODAY to
#1 - Lightning Fast Problem Solving
How should we find and solve our sales rep's problems? The usual way is reviewing a spreadsheet or CRM for 1-2 hours/day to identify activity and performance problems. Then use our sales experience or playbook to identify the solution
The problem is this method is VERY manual, slow, it can be more inaccurate, and relies on the manager being the source of truth, increasing the risk of the sales operation.
The better of problem solving is using automatic playbook mapping to activity data to quickly find the solution and instantly be empowered to go attack it.
What is Playbook Mapping?
Playbook mapping is the process of automatically finding a key metric that is performing lower than expected at a given time, associating the known reasons why this metric is low, and dispalying the solutions to those underlying issues for the sales manager to see clearly.
Here is an example of it in action:
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This is a MUCH faster way to execute problem solving because you're not wasting your valuable time and experience trying to remember or go search for the fix to your reps issue for an obviously documentable solution.
"Wait a minute...isn't it faster to use my experience to troubleshoot?"
We have to define troubleshooting as accurately finding and solving problems. Not just throwing proposed solutions, but real ones. However, we also need that accuracy to be fast for our sales team. The slower our problem solving is, the less money our sales team makes.
Most sales managers either spend too long to remember the correct solution, or they need to execute fast so they wrongly diagnose issues that are clearly documented in their sales playbook. It's not your fault, it's just far too risky to have all of your company troubleshooting power in the mind of a sales manager or executive.
Playbook mapping increases your speed to revenue, and also de-risks your sales department from going rogue one day and leaving you with 0 clue why it happened.
#2 - Quantitative Rep Scores
So how do we know how an individual sales rep is really contributing to the bottom line over time? On the Surface of this daily report, Greg looks like a beast sales rep who's taking names, lets go Greg!!
Hold on there cowboy. Greg had a good day, but he's not quite at A-Player level. Here's his last 2 weeks:
Appointments are near 0, all KPIs are consistently down, and he isn't even working his hours. NOT GOOD :)
The usual way of determining a reps overall contribution to the team is a "gut feeling." The issue with this approach is that it's SO easy to get caught up in the emotions of a person, that we sometimes lose clarity on the full picture of our reps. We forget about past good performance, we even forget about past bad performance.
The new way of judging a reps contribution is to generate a quantitative score for each rep. This score efficiently attributes how an individual sales rep is contributing overall to the departments performance based on KPIs, goals, and other activities.
Here is an example of this in action:
I want to make sure to celebrate Greg's win today, but I also want to be mindful moving forward that his overall trend needs to improve.
#3 - Automate Your Motivation
Sales teams run on hope and motivation. That's it. So how are managers supposed to keep their team hyped up? Usually, the sales manager is 100% responsible for motivating reps manually.
The problem is, sales managers are humans, so they're inconsistent. This causes sales reps to decay in performance because they're not getting their daily dose of direct motivation.
The new way of team motivation is automating the motivational touch-points your reps NEED. Team numbers, leaderboards, individual progress reports, etc. This automation frees up the sales manager's time, sales reps feel the competition and motivation more consistently, and transparency becomes a culture.
Here's an example of what you can automate:
Private Performance Reports Sent to Each Rep Daily
Leaderboard Notification in Slack for Entire Team to See
But won't reps respond less enthusiastically to an automation rather than their own manager?
Well, these automations are not meant to replace the 1on1 energy that comes from the sales manager. They are just reminders of live data formatted in a specific way to incite massive competition and transparency across the whole team with 0 work on your part.
Recap
So, to make sure your sales team squeezes out the most performance possible, you want to implement:
Playbook Mapping - For drastically shorter troubleshooting time, allowing you to fix problems faster, therefore making your team more money
Quantitative Rep Scoring - For a wholistic view on how your reps are connected to your companies goals actually being achieved
Automated Motivation - Ensuring the underlying motivation of the team chugs along without the risk of manager drop-of
Fast Ways to Implement
If you want to implement all of these quickly, check out Novah's Instant Visibility Platform. We have features designed to specifically do these 3 things so your team can dominate your market. We already had a customer close an extra $100k in monthly sales with the same sales team. The only difference was using our software to run the team.
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