Building a Successful Sales Team From The Ground Up

Author:  Alisa Walser

Throughout my career, I have been very fortunate to work for organizations that have allowed me to build and develop successful sales teams. Building a successful sales team is very rewarding. Many organizations make the investment of interviewing and hiring, but fail to bring out the best in their sales representatives. Below are a few pointers that will help to create successful sales people:

• Provide top-notch product training. Some argue that setting adults in a room for training for a week straight is counter-productive. I have experienced this dazed, glassy-eyed feeling a few times while at weekly sales meetings myself. Once you have given your new team or new hires all the information during the training, allow them to have an opportunity to step in and get their feet wet, they will vet out the amount of basic information they need to get started.
• Follow up two to three weeks after they have had a chance to apply the 20% of learning that they most likely retained from the training. Send out condensed, critical highlights via email (or other sales vehicle) for the next 6-8 weeks as recurrency training. You will be amazed at the additional information they will absorb once the training daze has subsided. They will begin to absorb additional snippets of information when they control the time to read the information and find the relevancy from their field activity.
• Keep it fresh, create sales challenges no matter how hokey you think they are and stay with them until the end. Encourage each team member to participate regularly to maintain the focus. Each sales challenge should consist of a fun, interest-creating launch, periodic status reports and an end goal. Celebrate their achievements throughout the challenge.
• Set clear, concise and achievable goals. Once the goals are set, require each individual team member to choose a personal reward they want once they have exceeded the goal. This is an extra goal for them to shoot for–put a picture in their workspace so they will continue to strive for that goal. Nothing is too small – the more personal the better.
• Reward them for the behavior that you want. This is the tried and true study of developing a sales team. Variable compensation should be easily understood and should create a positive path for them.

Above all, be consistent with information delivery, be consistent with your messages to the team, and be consistently encouraging. Remember the old saying; A little each day is much in a year.