Month: March 2024

The Role of Leadership in Shaping Sales Team Performance

Posted on by Nick Mann

The stronger your leadership, the better your sales team’s performance. There’s simply no denying the correlation. From coaching to communication to collaboration to culture, the caliber of your internal leaders impacts all aspects of your company. For this post, I’ll analyze this correlation in-depth, looking at concrete data and identifying key areas where leadership shapes sales team performance.

Some Telling Stats

To begin, let me paint a clear picture of how the competency and commitment of your leaders affect your sales team by looking at some compelling data. Here are some statistics that jumped out at me.

“High-performing sales leaders reported an overall average annual quota attainment of 105% compared to 54% for underperforming sales managers.” That’s nearly double! At the most fundamental level, having elite sales leaders heavily impacts your ability to reach your quota.

And this makes sense. If you have top-tier sales leaders at the helm, their professionalism will trickle down, helping you make more sales and generate far more revenue.

Next, “Employees who are supervised by highly engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged than those supervised by actively disengaged managers.” This illustrates another way your sales leaders’ behavior rubs off on the rest of your sales team.

If you have sales leaders who are truly committed and highly engaged, your salespeople will take notice, and most will feel compelled to follow their lead. It’s all about leading by example.

Going deeper, “Engaged employees had 59% lower turnover rates,” which, as we just discussed, is something largely impacted by sales leadership. In other words, when you have highly engaged sales leaders, it creates more engaged salespeople, which should significantly reduce turnover.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Excellent sales leadership can also help:

  • Boost productivity
  • Motivate the rest of your team
  • Ensure accountability
  • Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • Increase company resilience

On that note, let’s look closer at some specific ways leadership influences team performance.

Goal-Setting

Whether you’re dealing with lead generation, customer acquisition, customer retention, or any other aspect of sales, goal-setting is essential for accomplishing your objectives. Strong sales leaders understand this and 1) set clear, specific, measurable, realistic goals and 2) effectively communicate these goals to the sales team.

By doing so, this helps your salespeople know exactly what they need to accomplish and when — something that’s a critical precursor for sales success. On the other hand, lacking clear goals is almost always a recipe for failure, as your sales team won’t have any real direction.

If you’re looking for further examples of goals top sales leaders tend to focus on, here’s a great list for reference.

Coaching and Development

Even the best salespeople have to start somewhere, and hardly anyone comes out firing on all cylinders right away. It takes consistent coaching and development to fine-tune a rep’s skillset so that they’re able to fully realize their potential.

Another way leaders actively shape team performance is by acting as mentors to aid in this development. Consider these stats.

  • “77% of companies report improved sales performance as a result of coaching.”
  • “Companies that provide effective sales coaching can see up to a 16.7% increase in revenue.”
  • “83% of companies said that coaching helps new hires become productive more quickly.”
  • “92.8% of sales leaders believe that sales coaching has a significant impact on sales performance.”

Long story short, solid sales leaders facilitate coaching and development, either doing themselves with a hands-on approach or matching salespeople with other mentors who can help them in their progression.

Building a Positive Culture

I think we can all agree that having a positive company culture is a vital part of long-term success. And what’s one of the most important factors in creating a positive culture?

Strong leadership.

I like to use a pyramid as a metaphor. When you have great senior leaders at the top who are genuinely passionate about their role and committed to helping everyone else around them, it trickles down to managers to supervisors and ultimately to salespeople on the front line.

A leader’s mission, values, engagement, communication, work ethic, and so on spreads downward to every other branch of your company, including your sales team. So to establish a thriving culture, it starts at the top with dedicated leaders who are invested in helping your company succeed.

Adapting to Change

Today’s sales world, and the business world in general, is incredibly complex and ever-changing. Fueled largely by advancing technology, new trends are constantly emerging and entire industries can seemingly go from thriving to defunct overnight. No one is immune.

A huge part of not only adapting to change but thriving amidst it is having strong sales leadership. These individuals can successfully navigate change, plow through setbacks, overcome challenges, and capitalize on new opportunities. When you have people like this in charge of your sales team, it doesn’t matter what’s thrown at you.

Whatever the circumstances, they’re agile enough to make the necessary adjustments and ensure your sales team is equipped to succeed. When compared to a competitor that shirks from change, this can make a world of difference.

Enhancing Sales Team Performance By Finding Elite Sales Managers

In my opinion, sales success almost always requires a top-down approach, where you start by recruiting the cream of the crop sales managers, making this your main priority. Of course, you’ll want to also put plenty of effort into recruiting quality salespeople. But by giving elite management the reigns, the rest will usually fall into place.

Not only will their leadership aid in the areas mentioned above like goal-setting, salesperson coaching, and culture-building, they’ll have a final say in the reps you bring on board when hiring. So by recruiting top sales leaders, you should also be able to recruit top salespeople, creating a positive cycle.

When it comes to attracting, recruiting, and retaining top sales talent at all levels, it’s helpful to use cutting-edge, data-driven technology. With HireDNA, you can find sales leaders by analyzing 26 profile data points to find individuals who are most likely to succeed in your unique sales environment. You can get started with HireDNA here.

The First 90 Days: A Blueprint for New Hire Retention Success

Posted on by Nick Mann

The first 90 days after hiring a new salesperson are make or break. Make them feel welcome, get them up-to-speed quickly with efficient onboarding, and help them build team connections, and you stand a much greater chance of new hire retention.

On the other hand, failing to check these boxes can put them at far greater risk of premature turnover. Poor onboarding in particular is problematic, as 80% of new hires who receive lackluster onboarding say they plan to quit soon.

In this post, I’ll offer a simple blueprint for the first 90 days of a new salesperson’s tenure so you can get them plugged into your team, equip them for success, and dramatically increase new hire retention.

Create a Welcome Package

First impressions are everything. If you go out of your way to make a new sales rep feel welcome and quickly get their bearings, it sets a positive tone moving forward.

One of the best ways to do this is by creating a standard welcome package for every new hire, which “is a collection of paperwork, resources, information, and welcome items.” Here are some common things you may want to include:

  • A welcome letter
  • Team member directory
  • Office and parking lot layout information
  • An overview of your company culture
  • WiFi login info
  • Workplace policies
  • Recommended local restaurants and shops

You may also want to include some gifts like company apparel, books, or a gift card to get started out on the right foot. Here’s an example of what Salesforce includes in its welcome package.

For a detailed overview of how to create your own custom welcome package, I suggest reading this post from HR software company Eddy.

Offer Structured, Phased Onboarding

Research has found that “organizations with strong employee onboarding can increase retention by 82%.” However, a large number of today’s companies (36%) lack a structured onboarding process.

These numbers tell us that, by default, optimizing your onboarding process should put your brand in the top two-thirds, and there should be a tangible impact on retention. More specifically, it’s best to develop a structured onboarding system that moves in phases, allowing salespeople to gradually grow and build their skills without overwhelming them.

Here’s a simple example of what it may look like where phases are broken down into 30-day increments.

During the first 30 days, there’s a focus on the basics like understanding your company’s mission, learning the ins and outs of products, and identifying priorities. From 30 – 60 days, a rep is expected to gain three new accounts and manage three existing accounts. And from 60 – 90 days, a rep prepares for mid-level accounts, builds on their product knowledge, and so on.

Again, this is an oversimplified version of onboarding, but it shows how having a clearly defined system that lays the groundwork for incremental progress can help get a salesperson firing on all cylinders.

Have Routine Check-Ins

Whether it’s keeping tabs on a new salesperson’s progress, answering questions or concerns, or just chatting about their overall experience, maintaining a clear line of communication should go a long way in helping a rep reach their full potential while also providing a positive experience. This is especially important during the first 30 days when a person is just learning the ropes and should help any minor issues from escalating into larger ones.

Ideally, you’ll have a dedicated senior team member check in at regular intervals with each new hire. And always be sure that you 1) have an open door policy where reps know they can promptly get in touch with someone whenever they need to and 2) encourage them to initiate a discussion.

This brings us to the final part of the new hire retention formula.

Facilitate Relationship-Building

Another common barrier to retention is a lack of connectedness or, in many cases, loneliness — something that’s become quite common in the modern workplace. And we’re not just talking about remote workers. In total, 82% of employees said they felt lonely at work during a 2022 study.

Needless to say, if someone feels like they’re on an island, they’re unlikely to experience a high level of job satisfaction. When this happens at scale, it can create a serious turnover problem.

In terms of a solution, it largely boils down to being proactive about facilitating relationship-building. I like what The Harvard Business Review has to say about it.

“Building relationships during their first year can help new hires feel less isolated and more confident. New hires, in partnership with their manager, should identify 7-10 people — superiors, peers, direct reports, and internal and external customers — whose success they will contribute to, or who will contribute to their success. The new hire should then craft plans to connect with each stakeholder, one-on-one, during their first year.”

While your game plan doesn’t necessarily have to be as comprehensive as this, creating strong relationships should be a priority and is integral to building a winning culture.

New Hire Retention: Making the First 90 Days Count

With a third of salespeople quitting their jobs within the first 90 days, this is a critical time to go above and beyond. While there’s a lot that goes into maximizing new hire retention, four key areas to focus on are properly welcoming new salespeople, providing them with adequate onboarding, maintaining close communication, and helping them truly become part of the team.

By checking these boxes, you can help them get plugged in and fully integrated with the least amount of friction. In turn, you can reap the rewards of low turnover by reducing recruiting costs, strengthening company culture, boosting morale, and much more.

And if you’re looking to recruit the best of the best salespeople in your industry, check out the Objective Management Group sales assessment. It focuses on core competencies to find candidates who are not only great salespeople but who are equipped to thrive in your unique selling environment.