- Communicate the Company’s Vision regularly
During these uncertain times, your sales team will be feeling extremely nervous and worried about the security of their job. It is imperative that you remind them all the company’s mission, vision, and objective and explain how each one of them contributes towards it. Explain to them that even though the environment has changed, the company’s vision has not and although we may need to be using different tactics right now, the strategy remains the same.
- Coach and develop them on their sales calls
As you can no longer listen in to them making calls, I recommend you find a way for your sales team to record their calls (we use Phone Coach). You can then allocate 1 hour per person per week to listen to their call and critique it with them. I recommend the following way to critique a sales call: PIM (Positive/ Improvement/ Missed) Feedback. Turn your page horizontally and split it into 3 equal columns. Anything you feel was positive on the call write in the Positive section, anything you feel was said that could have been improved upon and anything you feel they missed.
- Keep it fun
It’s important to try and keep the role fun for them at certain times. I recommend a weekly quiz or share a story and ask them questions about things in the story and give a prize to the winner.
- Create a sales leader board for all to see
This is something you may have been doing before COVID anyway, if not it is a great time to introduce it. Choose a list of KPI’s you expect your sales team to be doing. Here is an example of ones my sales team do:
- Number of sales calls
- Number of Conversations
- Number of zoom appointments
- Number of Google reviews
- Number of referrals from existing clients
At the end of each week, the salesperson who has got the highest number in each KPI gets points. At the end of the month, the salesperson with the highest points gets to cash in on a prize. You choose the monetary value and in my company, each point is £1 and each KPI is worth 5 points to the person who gets the most in that KPI. Therefore, the most I give away at the end of the month is £25 to the winner.
- Get each salesperson to create their own sales bible
One of the benefits of COVID is the sales team no longer must travel into the office. Rather than spending that time in bed or ending their day early, they should use that time to invest in themselves. Depending on their preferred communication style, encourage each salesperson to read a sales book, watch a webinar, listen to a podcast, etc. Recommend to them that they record their learnings in a book, which will become their own sales bible. Each week, in a morning virtual meeting, encourage 1 of the team to share their most recent lesson that they wrote in their sales bible. This will enable the team to continuously learn, grow, and develop.
- Critique sales meetings
One skill that all salespeople need to develop to improve, is to be able to critique a sales meeting. One benefit of COVID is meetings are now conducted virtually and can be recorded. We use Zoom and record every zoom sales meeting. Once a week, I would recommend you watch one of the team’s meetings as a group and all critique it so you can learn from it together. Please note, this is not an opportunity to make fun of a colleague, it is an important step in everyone’s development.
- Develop a knowledge bible
Imagine you had a magic wand and within one shake of the wand, you upskill your entire sales team to learn everything about your company, your competitors, and your marketplace. All this information needs to be recorded in one place, which the sales team can access and learn; this becomes your knowledge bible. Start creating it and then delegate certain parts to individuals within your sales team. You can then do monthly knowledge quizzes on your company, where all your questions come from this bible.
