Managing a sales team requires a lot of patience and can be extremely stressful. If your business is in its early stages, you might be feeling out of your depth, so we’ve put together a list of 4 sales team management tips so that you can lead your team towards success.

Specialize early to grow sales

Your sales team is made up of individuals who each have their own skills that can contribute to your team in a positive way. It’s essential that you identify those strengths and weaknesses early on and segment your team accordingly as you grow. It’s also a good idea to ask your team members about their personal preferences – do they prefer to build rapport with small businesses or are they better at going after bigger leads? Your sales team will have the best chance at success if they are all utilizing their own unique skills.

Focus on training

Continuous training is essential to ensuring that everyone in your team is constantly up-to-date with their skills regarding product knowledge, prospecting, territory planning, professional communications, and opportunity management. Consistently developing the fundamentals of successful sales techniques should be a key element of your company culture so that sales performance goals and standards are met consistently throughout your team.

Be results-driven and offer incentives

When you’re growing your sales team, it’s essential to hire people with determination and drive that thrive in a transparent environment that is focussed on key sales metrics. When you gather a group of competitive people together to meet the same goal, it drives your entire company upwards. It’s important to emphasize the importance of results so that people are more focussed on productivity rather than activity.

While straight monetary incentives are great, you should also look at the “money can’t buy” options like gifts, gadgets and trips of a lifetime like a safari in South Africa.  Find out more about Cape Town Tourism here.

Use the volume-versus-value ratio

Your highest value team members (highest paid) should be focusing their time on the lowest volume activities that are the most important, such as securing partnerships and referrals and building relationships. Your lower value team members should instead be focused on higher volume activities that are less important, such as turning prospects into leads.

To fulfill your business’s potential and motivate your workforce, get in touch with our team at Commissionly today for more information about our sales commission software.

Having an effective and fair sales compensation program goes a long way in improving a business’s returns. However, unlike big corporations who have lacklustre compensation programs, small businesses operating on tight budgets can afford the same luxury.

The tight budgets mean most small businesses have not only poor sales team management strategies but also inefficient bonus performance compensation programs. However, all is not doom and gloom for you as a small business owner. Enter sales compensation software, an automated program that will help in maximising your employees’ value while minimising HR costs.

Sales compensation software will automate not only your sales but also the accounting and administration teams. Compensation management couldn’t get any easier for your small business. Here are some benefits you get incorporating a sales compensation software in your business;

1. Make smart and informed decisions

Small businesses have a limited workforce, which in most cases, is stretched to the limit. A sales compensation software provides you with an all in one dashboard containing relevant data that otherwise would consume a lot of time and manpower to collect.

From business bonus programs to the sales team productivity metrics, the software calculates commissions and compensations in one click. With this information, you can make objective decisions on your next sales management move.

2. Easily secure your data and keep it up to date

There has been an increase in the number of data breach cases reported by small businesses in recent years. An ideal sales compensation software secures your sales metrics –compensation and commission – among other sales data to avoid access to competing businesses.

Besides, the software ensures sales records and performance indicators are up to date. Hence you can always anticipate what is coming up ahead in terms of market returns before your competitors.

3. Simplifies motivating your employees

With built-in features such as badges and leader boards, sales compensation software ensure you incentivise your team correctly. The software also provides teams with a sales commission portal from which managers can easily access sales data. Hence they can identify which employees need to up their game and what goals and targets need readjusting.

Automation of sales compensation will help your business avoid common compensation errors. Get software that also allows your sales teams to verify their earnings to ensure there is a complete trust in the system. Try out Commissionly, sales compensation calculator, to ensure your business adjusts accordingly to changing sales market conditions.

Covid-19 has dramatically changed the way businesses operate, almost overnight. Many companies have had to shut their doors to customers, and have their staff working from home. This means that the way companies act has had to change too. While each team will have been impacted in a unique way, sales teams are facing an immediate need to bring in revenue to keep the company stable, despite the new lockdown rules.

Here are three ways that sales teams can adapt during Covid-19 with a little help from sales performance management software.

1. Keeping your sales team motivated

Many sales teams have competitions surrounding their sales performance goals, and this should be true while working remotely. Keeping your team motivated with additional bonuses and benefits will encourage them to stay focused at work, while also showing them that you understand the increased pressures of working remotely. Your existing sales targets can easily be adapted for remote working, especially if you have effective sales performance management software. Also, try these tips [https://commissionly.io/how-to-build-motivation-during-a-slow-period/] for building team motivation too!

2. Continue listening to customers

Listening to customer feedback is always essential, and if your work practices have had to change quickly, then it is important to understand how your customers feel about your new way of working. Ask your team to gather customer feedback, as it is essential to enriching the customer experience. This could be in the form of feedback sheets or questionnaires, but simple verbal feedback is also useful. This may not normally be the job of your sales team, but remind them how important it is, and implement the constructive feedback that you receive.

3. Increase internal communication

Because you no longer have a centralised place for your employees to gather, you need to ensure that they are still getting the important information they need. Everything from information from head office, all the way to new remote sales strategies need to be communicated in a timely manner. The best way to do this is through digital team meetings, where all the new information can be disseminated to the team quickly and efficiently, making sure no one is missed out.

At Commissionly, we are keeping our fingers on the pulse during these trying times. For more information about how our sales performance management software can help you, schedule a demo call with one of our team members: https://commissionly.io/book-a-demo/

Are you a growing ‘start-up’ business looking to increase your sales growth?

Sales commission schemes are a great way to get your employees putting in extra effort towards reaching their sales goals. However, it is difficult to decide on the type of incentive you should offer your staff, especially if you are relatively new to the scene.

1. Design your sales commission scheme appropriately

Explain to your employees that alongside their base salary, the sales commission scheme will grow and develop alongside the business’ success. Therefore, the greater effort put in early on would prove beneficial to all.

This is a useful way to start as it will be based on the real numbers being achieved, as opposed to a number sucked out of thin air.

2. Be careful with stretching goals

Offering audacious goals or targets beyond 100% can be a great way of getting staff already achieving to push themselves even further. However, if someone is struggling to meet targets this may cause further frustration. It is important to be optimistic but also to be realistic. And tailoring these ‘stretched goals’ to the individual will be far more effective in the long run. This is because people don’t work the same or have the same motivation. So essentially you’re helping them help you.

3. Properly incentivise your sales team

There can be a lot to calculate when starting out, and an easy mistake is to offer an incentive that is either too low to adequately motivate, or too high that you end up out of pocket.

Using sales commission management software is a fantastic way to alleviate these time-consuming tasks, therefore giving you more time to build your sales team’s confidence and ability. You can continue to recalculate commission rates with the software as your sales team grow in success and your profits rise.

So it is important to maintain a commission structure that works best for everyone through using real-time performance figures. ANd here at Commissionly, we offer many useful software packages and tools that can make the running of your business much more seamless. Our software is able to calculate complex commission values efficiently and accurately that can be tailored to the needs of your business.

When it comes to sales performance goals, there are many different aspects to consider. One of those is the current trading conditions of the industry. For most industries, there are going to be times when there are slow periods.

During these times, it can be hard to motivate your team. Sales teams that aren’t motivated will often fail to meet sales performance goals. And this can be a problem in the long-term.

If this happens, your business’s performance can be worse than expected. And some staff might think they’ll lose their jobs during one month of bad performance.

The key to this is to keep motivation high when times are tough. So, how do you do this? Here are some of the top solutions.

1. Non-monetary rewards

A great option is to add non-monetary rewards. These can be applied to work such as the time spent on the phone, adding new leads to the database, etc. Such a reward need not be linked to the conversion of sales (that is “rewarded” with sales commission), it is rather rewarding tasks that may be neglected. Keep in mind that such tasks can still be monitored in sales performance software.

Some Good examples might be an extra hour off at lunch or food hampers. Having some non-monetary rewards, allow for the effectiveness of the sales commission to still be maintained.

2. Run team-building exercises

Team building exercises can be a great way for your team to come together and face the slow times as a community. They can build communication skills, learn vital selling skills and even have some fun. All of these build on the effectiveness of the sales team.

It’s also good to arrange team-building exercises during quiet periods. Then you won’t disrupt the successful run of sales and restrict the team’s earning potential. It also means they could exceed sales performance goals and feel better about their skills.

3. Good leadership

The importance of leadership is really vital during slow periods. A good leader will continually communicate with their staff and remind them of their skills and/or value during the good and bad times. You can use comparisons to the past year’s slow period and show any sign of sales improvements since then.

Leaders should always be present. Team members can feel more confident when they see the leadership team taking an interest in their everyday work. When out and about, talk to your team and ask them how they are going. You can offer guidance on how they can improve and meet sales performance goals. And if you are unable to be in the office together, then do the same through conference calls, emails, etc. The team needs the communication, while stuck at home, more than ever to get through bad times.

All businesses have good times and bad times. During the good times, you should push them to maximise results. This ensures that during bad times, you can build on the skills of your sales team and keep spirits high, preparing for the next busy season.