Your sales team is perhaps the most powerful tool available to grow your business, but imagine what they could accomplish if they were fully enabled.
2021 And The Year of Sales Enablement
More than ever, your sales team is uniquely positioned to grow your business like never before.
It’s up to your executives and sales leadership to ensure everyone driving sales – from a chief sales officer to the entire sales and marketing team – has the information, tools, and knowledge to effectively sell your product.
How to Empower Your Sales Team
To fully empower their sales team, executives and leadership must learn to let go.
As you are aware, sales move incredibly fast. Any sales team or associate who has to pause to check with the boss, look for information, or second-guess will likely lose the critical time needed to keep customers engaged and close the deal.
“Letting go” might sound frightening. Especially when it means putting the sales and reputation of your company in the hands of someone else. That is where sales enablement comes in.
You need executives and team leaders who focus on training for success in this push for sales. Especially critical are the top management professionals who believe in three critical steps to setting up the sales team for success:
Clarity
Communication is paramount to clarity with your sales team. Having clearly defined sales goals, expectations, and well-defined roles and responsibilities eliminates confusion around deliverables, and helps create accountability for your sales team.
This should seem fairly straight forward. But for many sales executives, this might be harder than it sounds.
In many businesses, there is often an unspoken pecking order that the team, especially its leaders. Keep in mind, it might not be discussed freely, but it is certainly tangible in the relationship between a newly hired sales associate and a tenured executive.
In this common scenario, executives often don’t see themselves as beholden to the staff beneath them. As such, they might not feel it would be their responsibility to explain their reasoning behind key decisions – to explain the “why,” or at least impart critical information that can help even an expert sales team truly understand the foundation for their performance goals.
Culture
It cannot be understated that creating a culture that fosters action and rewards achievements can have an incredible impact on your sales team. But what about learning?
Successful executives and key leaders aren’t just focused on finding genuine ways to celebrate their team’s accomplishments and milestones. They are also taking advantage of the incredible power of learning from missteps and difficulties.
The thinking is – associates or sales teams are rarely able to reap rewards without taking risks. As such, even taking measured risks comes with occasional missteps. And that’s okay.
When leadership is “all-in” with their team, they’re taking the time to demonstrate the valuable lessons in mistakes. They’re asking the team for input, collaborating for solutions and fostering a culture of trust among their team.
Coaching
Coaching brings it all together. Taking the time to clearly outline expectations and goals in a culture of trust and accountability, you’re set to map out implementation.
With training that is tailored to your sales team’s needs, you can now train for:
- POS and CRM software
- Company values
- Key messaging points
- Popular and evolving sales tactics
- What motivates your customers
All these training points, when delivered consistently to your sales team, will begin to paint the larger picture of how your product or service solves a unique problem for your customers and how to leverage that solution to close the deal.
Pressure Test Your Coaching
Once your sales executives and leadership team creates these innovative solutions and gets the whole sales team on board, then they’re ready for the last critical step of letting go – that crucial phase in fully enabling the team to freely engage customers, close deals and ultimately grow your business.
But even in this hands-off phase, the very best sales leadership won’t stop there. Great leaders work to objectively pressure-test their coaching in a number of ways.
On the technical side, your sales leadership can begin by reviewing the quantitative results of performance metrics in relation to the qualitative performance of their sales team.
But also, the best team leaders put a premium on just following up in a human way. Checking in and getting the mood of the team can reveal a lot about how well the coaching has enabled them to feel empowered and motivated to capture sales.
Recruiting the Right Sales Leaders/Executives
Current sales and marketing initiatives are trending towards enabling sales teams to act quickly and capture sales. Fostering an autonomous and enabled team is the best way to get the results today’s businesses are after.
If this sounds like your business, and you’re looking for the right sales leadership and executives who can enable their team to succeed, contact ImpactSearch today, and let us know how we can help.
