5 Key Areas To Challenge Your Sales Reps In Order To Drive Growth

The true nature of sales leadership involves being able to challenge your team openly and responsibly. You owe it to them and your company to be the type of leader that’s not afraid to hold your team accountable. From a culture prospective, this really sets the tone for driving necessary growth to remain competitive in today’s world. And to be clear, growth isn’t restricted to revenue numbers. Too often, management will focus on sales numbers, when in fact, sales numbers are the result of behaviors that are in place – positive or negative. In order to transition yourself from a typical “sales manager” to a “sales leader”, you must be willing to confront your team in areas where you see development opportunities. Even if it means introducing a bit of friction into the equation.

Outfield is constantly evolving, and it’s directly tied to the culture we put in place. We have created an environment where employees expect to be challenged, are pushed to function outside of their comfort zones, have no problem holding their colleagues accountable for high-quality performance. Putting this type of culture in place has contributed significantly to our growth as a startup and I would like to share areas where we’ve focused on to achieve that result.

Although this article pertains to the sales team, other job functions could benefit from time spent reflecting on the points made here. There are many areas where company growth can be fostered. It starts with your team. Consider these five areas:

1. Sales Performance

Sales rep performance is the most obvious area where they should be challenged. Month over month performance, quarterly, etc. are where a lot of sales leaders direct their attention. Are your reps hitting their quota? Are they generating enough referrals? Are they improving percentage-wise in their conversion metrics?

Using Competition To Drive Performance – At Outfield we are huge advocates of this. Two areas where you can leverage competition to drive performance are:

• Setting goals for your individual reps against their personal bests and rewarding them accordingly.
• Implementing contests centered on various aspects of daily operations where reps compete against their colleagues in delivering positive results. Because no one wants to be viewed as the weak link of their team, ego can be used to drive personnel performance. This extends itself into overall sales growth mainly because average performance metrics are lifted across the entire team.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility – Do not be afraid to raise that quota! If you’re properly developing your sales reps in the areas of the subsequent sections of this article, then it is safe to assume that their capacity for productivity has expanded. This should sit well with the rep because it will lead to higher commission checks for them. Just make sure, as a sales leader, that you’re doing your part to set them up for success.

Get Your Crew Comfortable With Consistently Asking For Referrals – Asking for referrals is sometimes an afterthought for salespeople when it should absolutely not be! They are so excited to have closed a deal or, in other instances solely focused on solving immediate client concerns that they forget to ask for a referral. If you can remember to put cream in your coffee every day, you should be able to form a habit around asking for referrals from happy customers. Every time you have a post-sale touchpoint with your current customers, salespeople should be asking how they can create additional value for business professionals in their client’s network.

Sales leaders should be tracking the number of referrals their reps receive and constantly coaching to improve those numbers. When your sales reps form the proper habits around referral generation, it leads to accelerated growth for the company. It is also a sign that your business’ customer retention tactics are producing because customers are only likely to recommend when they are happy with the services themselves.

2. Self-Improvement

There is a positive correlation between personnel development and company growth. Likewise, you can expect the opposite to occur. At best, no growth among your team members will equate to stagnation in individual and overall performance metrics. This means that as a leader of men and women, management should constantly be implementing situations that drive the team to become better. Leadership, creativity, business acumen, emotional/social intelligence, and salesmanship are a few areas where you should be trying to develop your sales team. To zero in on this involves you spending one-on-one time with your individual team members often enough to identify their strengths and weaknesses – as they evolve.

Moreover, true leadership is proven by your ability to develop other leaders. When examining members of your team, you should be evaluating them from a long-term vantage point. What does his or her career path look like based on identified strengths? Your goal should be to help them get there. Tailoring your personnel development course to each person should be your approach.

Personally, I love the challenge of bringing the best out of my team. I deliberately take them outside of their comfort zones to stretch their capabilities. I also use this as an opportunity to see how they’ll respond. Part of what you’re trying to learn is their threshold for discomfort. More weaknesses and strengths can be identified along the way. The more often you’re able to do this with an individual, the more you will see development occur. A higher level of confidence will be built into them, and they will appreciate you for it.

In addition to assigning difficult circumstances, assign reading materials for your team that will expand their thinking. You’ll know that the learning has crystalized when you begin to see them applying what they have learned. 

3. Creativity

The moment your company ceases to be creative is the moment your company is set to be doomed. It’s called “creative destruction”, because I can guarantee someone else is out there generating ideas that can potentially destroy your business model. Outfield is a customer focused company. This means that every decision we make considers how our customers will be impacted. It’s ingrained in our culture and extends from sales and marketing to R&D and beyond. I’ve been fortunate to have a team who has responded to this focus in a very positive and productive way.

Here is what you gain by being a customer-centric company – a better attunement with customer needs, pain points, and factors that are trending around their business requirements. This will lend itself to more creative contributions from your sales team. Being aligned closely with your customers better situates your company to anticipate the incremental needs they will face over time. Because they are on the frontline, your sales reps are critical in the execution of customer centricity. Their discovery calls are pivotal because it’s an opportunity to ask a variety of questions relating to customer business needs and the efforts they are taking to remain competitive. Further, because your reps are interacting with hundreds of other similar companies, they will start to narrow in on patterns they are seeing. In many instances, the customers themselves are unaware of these patterns.

The information your sales teams are producing from being on the front line should be leveraged fully to understand how your company can continue generating value for your various customer segments. Value is the key to growth, right? So be smart and challenge your sales executives to speak up during marketing brainstorming sessions. Their experience will contribute creative insights impacting the future outlook of your company.

Additionally, their creative efforts will lead to more closed deals. There have been many instances where my team has had to bring in a third-party solution in order to close a deal. In other situations, they’ve been able to close deals by offering customized accommodations (service or software features). If my team didn’t approach business development this way, then we would have lost numerous deals and missed out on many creative solutions that turned out to be re-marketable. Think about it.

4. Critical Thinking

Passiveness in a salesperson is a sign of carelessness and even worse, weakness. Both are attributes that generate mediocre results. The best thing you can do is to try and identify these characteristics before making an offer to bring them aboard your ship. However, that is easier said than done. Even more, is that some reps don’t start out this way. It’s an evolution that sets in over time. The reasons are debatable. It could be a reflection of the company culture, personal matters, disenchantment with the day-to-day. Often time, it has to do with the management that is in place.

As a manager, one of the best things you can do to inspire your sales team is to challenge them to think critically. Whether it’s with management decisions that you have made, problem-solving, or generating solutions for their client, an employee’s ability to process information and cross-examine it is important for a number of reasons:

• It keeps you, as a manager, on your toes. If the people underneath you are numb-minded or careless, then you have severely limited the potential for your own personal development let alone company sales growth.
• Actively problem-solving is likely up there as the most important attribute for a salesperson. Demonstrating initiative in this way removes a lot of pressure on the manager having to do everything. One thing that I’ve learned over my many years in leadership, is that if your head is constantly in the weeds, it is impossible to look upwards towards growth initiates. Activity challenging your reps to lead by applying critical thinking towards problem-solving will reduce your headaches 10-fold. Stop micromanaging and start delegating and trusting your team to make the right decisions. They won’t do everything right, but they will grow from their mistakes and in the process develop their leadership capabilities.
• There will be situations where challenging your client on their ideas is warranted. As an expert on your solution and their business, you’ll see things that they don’t necessarily see. If done in the right spirit (with a genuine interest in helping improve their business) they’ll develop a deeper respect for you as a partner. Alternatively, if you allow your sales executives to sit passively when engaging their clients, the customers will quickly dismiss their presence as worthless. The moment this happens is the moment they’ll seek out the right partners elsewhere. I’ve seen it happen too many times. Train your team to participate actively in their customer’s strategy ideation process.

5. Professionalism

This is an area that is sometimes minimalized as an obvious gesture, and as a result, often goes somewhat as an afterthought. In reality, this is arguably the most important attribute to a salesperson’s career. Traditionally, the topic of professionalism is viewed as adhering to the proper dress code, punctuality, or generally how you present yourself. This is all true, but being that these points are hit upon constantly, I’ll sidestep those glaring characteristics to others that I think are equally important.

Protect Your Time – Time is everyone’s most important asset. It is truly the one thing that neither of us can get back. This means that we must safeguard it as best we can. Specifically, even more critical in the sales person’s ability to drive revenue growth, is how they protect their time. Sure, we know to coach our team members to plan out their week and turn off distracting smartphone notifications. However, these items aren’t the biggest impediment to their time management. No, it’s their client engagement and preparation for those meetings. Have you ever spent hours prepping for a sales call only to have the prospect not show? If you’ve been in sales for a while this is inevitable. And rather than being frustrated, our natural inclination, you should instruct them to demonstrate professionalism here by acknowledging the missed appointment in their follow up message to the prospect. The communication should bring attention to the prospect’s absence in a way that shows empathy and understanding, but also a responsibility for both parties to respect each other’s time. Here is an example of a message I would send:

Hello _____

I hope and trust that all is well.

It seems you weren’t able to make our appointment this afternoon. I understand that things can come up last minute. Please let me know your availability for us to reschedule and I’ll try my best to accommodate. Thanks so much, as I realize that our precious time is valuable.

The trick is to not be passive aggressive. The best way to do this is by allowing time for any initial negative emotions to subside, but do get your point across! You’ll come up with your own way of teaching your reps to accomplish this. The point is – if your sales reps don’t respect their time in front of customers, you can be sure their customers won’t.

Domain Expertise – One of the easiest ways to drive revenue growth is by penetrating specific industry verticals at a time. Literally, word-of-mouth increases as your company becomes more relevant within a specific space. As your brand becomes more concentrated within certain verticals, the more you will have customers coming your way. As this happens, it is your responsibility to train your team to become domain experts. There are many ways to do this, but I have my sales team accomplish this by:

• Running deep dive discovery calls. Some companies instruct their teams to run these types of calls just learn if a prospect will qualify for your products or services. Not us, we take it a step further. We want to understand as much as we reasonably can about the company, their present situation, key players along with company pain points. The more you have these conversations, the more you’ll able to anticipate problems facing similar companies.
• Take advantage of Porter’s Five Forces Framework. Porter’s will help your sales team understand better the variables that impact a company’s decision-making process with regards to their competitive environment.
• True Understanding of The Customer’s Business – In order to position your team as a true solution provider for their clients, understanding the business they’re building is an absolute must! An easy way to accomplish this is having your team fill out at Business Model Canvas for a company archetype, or you can be more specific to the company’s business you are trying to win. The BMC framework is one of the best and quickest ways to understand comprehensively how a company is run and what it values. I often instruct my team to leverage this resource when dealing with a customer that they are working hard to pull in. Once they understand the various foundations that a client is built upon, they’re better perceived as an authority figure and, therefore, able to make recommendations that are tailored. Customers are much more likely to work with you once you have convinced them that you know what you are talking about. This is true professionalism.

Conclusion

This article was meant to shed some light on specific areas of personnel development that have generated tons of positive ROI from all parties involved. The returns expand throughout the entire company and have had a clear as day impact on top-line growth on our organization. I’m sure if sales leadership begins to focus on these keys area, your company will generate improved revenue metrics while putting in place a culture that’s transformative in today’s competitive environments.

If you have additional points to share regarding this topic, I would love to hear your feedback. Cheers to growth ladies and gentlemen!