How can HR support sales team for better sales performance? | Aparna Sharma | Consulting Editor | The People Management

The efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of sales representatives directly impacts the revenue, so organizations must look for ways to engage sales people better to improve their general productivity. Having fun, and upbeat motivation strategy always works better than a repetitive one, so here are some of the easy and implementable ways to engage sales people and improve their efficiency.

1. Create a Culture of Recognition

Rewarding your sales reps with small commissions isn’t enough, sometimes people get motivated with just praise or recognition among teams. You can also motivate them by offering a tangible and experience-based incentive.  So, respect your sales team, make them involved and organize training to nurture their talents and this will undoubtedly result in higher efficiency.

2. Check-in with Your Team

Individual check-ins are a grand strategy to chat with your sales reps and help them to know about the hits and misses and how to do course corrections. This is especially important for new reps that have been freshly onboarded as you can coach them and having a regular feedback session with teams will also get a good response.

3. Utilize Sales Tools

Having proper sales tools that automate monotonous tasks and help to track productivity is a boon in disguise to maximize sales force productivity. Sales tools help sales people to keep track of their data, schedule phone calls and meetings, organize work and focus on the business instead of doing manual, time taking administrative tasks.  Sales tools like CRMs, communication apps, and route planning apps help to better measure rep performance, progress with clients, sales time, leads conversion, etc. By utilizing this data, leaders can understand the sales folks better and recommend them better ideas on how to increase their productivity.

4. Align various departments

When departments such as sales and marketing operate in silos, it leads to missed opportunities. organization-wide disconnects, and lost revenues. At the same time, the alignment of departments with shared goals and metrics will result in better quota achievement, lead conversion, and more profits which emphasizes why collaboration is essential.  Having your sales and marketing teams aligned helps them take advantage of shared knowledge, determine pain points and create a robust lead. Collaborating on a single plan makes sales people feel invested in lead generation, while it helps marketers engaged by having their lead turn to sales.

5. Sharing the Big Picture

When it comes to engaging the sales force, it’s important to integrate them with the rest of your organization. They bring the business so they must feel that their work directly affects the success of the company.  That’s why leaders must share how each sales rep fits into the big picture, and how their next roles can make a more significant difference in the future. This will drive the engagement of your sales people by giving that sense of purpose to work harder at their jobs and inspire their loyalty to your business. Having a clear line of sight towards growth within the company incentivizes people to work harder.

To have a top-producing sales team, you need to have a great rapport with your sales team, and ensure that you manage them with the right approach.  Be available to guide them, provide them with sales acceleration and sales enablement tools, invest in their career growth and provide training opportunities to strengthen the bond with your team and drive their engagement organically.