With competition as fierce as it is these days, your sales team can truly be what makes or breaks your business. But having a perfect sales team isn’t just about having numerous employees who all perform effectively in the same manner. You’ll need to have a team made up of unique workers that accurately and precisely address your organization’s needs as a business.
And this is a multi-step process that many struggle with time and again, especially if an organization is offering a niche product/service to a very broad audience. But don’t fret!
We have a four step process to help you navigate the most common challenges sales teams face—and best of all, advice from a pro in the field, so you can trust its validity!
The Most Common Challenges Sales Coaches See
Having worked in sales and sales management for over 20 years, Ken Cheo has found that the most common challenges organizations face are due to a lack of clearly defined strategies, processes, and positions.
Specifically, as president and owner of Our Sales Coach, a professional training and coaching organization, he has worked with tech and tech-related businesses and manufacturers from across the globe. And time and again, he has found that organizations have poorly defined or too broad a target audience as well as an incompatible or incomplete sales team.
In addition to rectifying these by helping these businesses focus on their markets and more specifically define the positions they require to achieve their goals, Cheo often helps with the following:
- finding opportunities in the market
- prospecting strategies and determining formulas to enact these strategies
- picking activities and frequencies for sales teams to enact regularly to hit goals
- tracking goal setting and relevant activity to see how close they are to achieving them
- focusing on application over theory
A very hands-on-oriented coach, Cheo works one-on-one with organizations to find specific problem points. And while every business has its unique challenges and obstacles, many overlap.
To combat these issues, then, Cheo suggests practicing the following four steps to take toward improving your sales team and your overall business growth.
4 Easy Steps to Creating a Perfect Sales Team
1. Clearly Define Your Sales Strategy
Start by clearly defining your sales strategy. This process, Cheo notes, includes customer segmentation—or, determining who the target audience is and how to target them through their defined demographics or behaviours—and considering the products/services you have to offer each. This also includes considering the steps necessary to enact that sales process that contributes towards business growth.
Specifically, Cheo notes that most organizations have too broad a market and are not therefore focusing their efforts as effectively as they could be.
“You should be the superstar for your best types of customers,” Cheo says. This requires understanding the marketplace and taking advantage of opportunities within specific circumstances where you can adequately shine as an organization.
2. Determine Your Go-to Market Strategy
Particularly within your go-to market strategy, Cheo notes, you’ll need to select your sales and marketing channels. This means testing your target audience via the channels you use to approach them and testing the messages you use to do so.
And in order to consider how well each of these variables are doing in this testing, you’ll need to set goals and measure them against your actual sales and other markers of productivity.
3. Design Your Perfect Sales Team
Step three involves determining the steps involved in your sales approach and what kinds of salespeople might be most successful in performing such work.
That is to say, not every salesperson will be equally as effective in performing the specific tasks you’ll need to accurately target the needs and wants of your target audiences. And determining what kind of approach your product/services requires short- and long-term will help you and your team decide what kind of approach is necessary.
Some questions to consider when hiring for your sales team, then, might include:
- What kind of sales person are you looking for: a long-term relationship-building kind of salesperson? An account manager?
- Does your ideal salesperson need to know how to and have the personality to prospect?
- Do they have the acumen to navigate the business decisions necessary for a billion-dollar corporation and deal with multiple executive members?
Each of these characteristics are specific to different types of salespeople. And not all types of salespeople will be equally as necessary for your organization. You may need more of one type over another, depending on existing customer relationships or a lack thereof.
So, consider your audiences, what connections you may already have, and what the needs of each might look like. What, then, does your ideal sales team look like?
4. Seek Those Team Members Out
The last step in creating your perfect sales team, then, is actually finding the perfect workers whose skills specifically match your game plan.
And this goes far deeper than finding keywords on a resume such as “strong at selling.” Specifically, you’ll need to determine the personality traits that accurately target what kind of salesperson you’re looking for.
Cheo gives the example of looking for those who are adaptable, as they are often those who can best navigate challenging sales situations. As well, he suggests looking for salespeople who are notably resilient—that is, who can prospect and handle rejection with ease time and again.
To easily effectively determine what kind of sales personality a worker has, we suggest offering them a Packfinder assessment. This is our very own psychometric assessment that can determine the soft skills a worker naturally has and how effectively they would suit 60 specific job functions.
And we highly recommend Packfinder for finding such team members because of its ability to both accurately measure a person’s soft skills, such as their interpersonal skills and comfort with conflict, and its ability to filter automatically for candidates based on such criteria.
This makes finding specific sales team members faster and more effective than doing so through traditional resume scanning and interviewing methods.
Summary
Photo courtesy of Ken Cheo
After meeting with Ken Cheo, President and Owner of Our Sales Coach, we conclude that growing a business requires focused and clearly defined processes and roles, including the organization’s target audience and sales positions. It’s both ineffective and detrimental to an organization’s productivity to approach too broad a market and do so with the wrong kind of salespeople—that is, those with a specific approach that does not suit your target audience.
Effective growth, then, starts with clearly defined sales and go-to market strategies and specific sales roles that address your organization’s approaches to said target audiences.
For support doing the above, reach out to Cheo himself at oursalescoach.com. Then, when you’re ready to recruit and on-board your specific salespeople for enacting your newly refined business plan, check out the Workwolf platform! Click here to sign up for a Workwolf business account to start finding your star sellers today.
Special thanks to Ken Cheo for all the expert advice in this blog!
