A sales team is a key asset to your business and it’s important to keep a close eye on their performance. So much depends on your sales team’s ability to connect with the customer, making sure your unique value proposition is relevant, exciting, and valuable to them.

Sales is a challenging activity and you need to make sure your salesforce is ready and willing to crush your revenue goals. 

But how can you assess that? What approach can you use to evaluate the effectiveness of your sales operations?

In this post, we’re listing 4 questions you should ask yourself to make sure that your sales team is optimized for performance and all of your team members are getting what they need from you to do their job at optimal levels. 

With no further ado, let’s dive into int!

#1 Is the Selling Effort Structured for the Most Effective Market Coverage?

What type of sales structure does your business need? Are you approaching sales through inbound or outbound marketing? Are you going for advertising or personal selling? 

There is no one-size approach, but it’s important to make sure that whatever approach is adopted by your business, is well-aligned with all of the relevant variables.

The first element to consider in order to maximize your sales performance involves analyzing the types of products or services you’re bringing to market. 

Your sales team needs to be structured to convert an interest in a purchase and to do that it needs to understand what sales strategy may be the most effective. Can cold-calling work? Do you need to set up a multi-tiered approach to warm-up customers to the sale?

Not only that, your retail outlet needs to take into account the distribution strategy that is best equipped to serve your customers. Is it intensive distribution, selective distribution, or exclusive distribution? Here’s an article that explains the differences among these approaches.

To each their own, by clarifying the value your brand is providing to your customers you’ll be able to pinpoint the right approach that perfectly fits your customer’s needs.

#2 Is the Sales Staffed With the Right People?

Sales is not a job, it’s a calling. We would actually suggest that certain sales skills can be learned, but for many people, certain aptitudes are just a natural trait. 

Sales require people skills which are not always easy to come by, especially for the types of sales techniques we are seeing more and more often in retail stores. 

To some extent, sales are now very close to customer service, as the approach is now more focused on enhancing a customer’s experience rather than pitching a particular product. 

To this extent, as you put together your dream team, focusing on customer-service orientation and an aptitude to serve customers could help you identify the perfect candidates to join your sales force.

If you’d like to learn more about this customer-service-oriented approach to sales and how to recruit talent, here’s an article that delves into the subject.

#3 Is Strong Guidance Provided?

What about your sales team’s leadership? Another important element to consider is the degree of guidance you are providing to your sales team. 

Is there anything you can do as a manager to bring your team to the next level? Are you sure they may not benefit from some additional training or advice? 

Each salesperson may have their own tricks of the trade, but at the same time, your salesforce needs to act as one, following similar strategies and pursuing the same goals. As a manager it is your role to guide them and, to some extent, to lead by example. 

Investing time “on the floor” or on sales calls with your sales assistants can inspire them and make them see in practice some skills that they may learn from you.

Are you making sure that your team does not any further support? In this sense, it may be helpful to ask your colleagues for feedback and find out whether there is any help you may provide. 

As managers, we need to remember that we have access to much more information than a regular employee and we may need to identify all of the information that needs to be shared to assist your team in reaching their goals. 

#4 Does the Sales Compensation Plan Offer the Proper Motivation?

Last but not least we need to remember that compensation is an important element of motivation that cannot be downplayed. 

Are your employees paid enough to get them excited and engaged with their revenue targets? 

It’s important to take into account that different compensation packages are available for those who work in sales, as commission-based compensation can help you keep your costs low but employee motivation high. This is unique to a sales role and it may be helpful to take advantage of this special compensation format. Fixed compensation, can in fact reduce the motivation of your sales team to go above and beyond with customers.

It’s also important to remember that money may not be the only approach to rewarding your best employees. 

There are many non-financial incentives that can really get the best out of your salesforce. 

If you’d like to read more about this, here’s an article where we discuss the topic in depth. 

Great! Now that we’ve covered all of our tips, it’s time to draw a few conclusive remarks.

Conclusions

There you have it! In this post, we’ve covered 4 questions you should ask yourself to assess the effectiveness of your sales team. 

It’s only by asking the right questions that we can identify some weak spots that might require some fine-tuning. 

If you’re looking to learn more about sales strategies for your brand, you should also look into this article, where we discuss 6 types of sales promotions you can use to increase your revenue. 

If you’re interested in retail and sales, then you should definitely check out our blog where we share a wealth of information on fashion, marketing, and retail management. Enjoy!